Article
Court astrologers, traditions from many countries, what the Vedas say, and why separate traditions describe the same things in different languages.
How does astrology know your character traits, and in such detail? Why can it tell you more about a couple's compatibility than you might ever guess? Why can it show which periods of your life tend to be heavy and which are light? When to act, and when to wait it out? Why can it help you plan your life from birth to old age?
It's the same kind of question as these. Why can doctors restore your health? Why can biologists explain how animal species came about? Why could people who invented the wheel and the abacus go on to invent the car and the aeroplane, and even reach space?
All of it happened for one and the same reason.
People observed. They wrote down and remembered what each observation told them. They checked and confirmed what they saw, drew rules from it, gave things names and went deeper into the system. That's how, starting from the wheel, the abacus and mathematics, they came to build flying machines.
Astrology grew in exactly the same way. For thousands of years, stargazers remembered and recorded the positions of the planets at the births of emperors and members of royal families. Every royal house had its own court astrologers, often from different traditions.
Assyria and Babylon. In the 7th century before the Common Era (BCE), the kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal kept a whole network of court observers. Their reports have come down to us on clay tablets from the library at Nineveh. There was even a custom of the substitute king. If an omen signalled danger to the ruler, another person was placed on the throne for a time, while the real king stepped aside.
Egypt. Priests watched the flooding of the Nile and the rising of Sirius, which marked the start of their year.
India. According to tradition, the court of King Vikramaditya had nine jewels, nine sages, and one of them was Varahamihira, author of classic works on Jyotish, Vedic astrology. Later, court Jyotish astrologers served the Mughal emperors Akbar and Jahangir.
China. The imperial astronomical bureau, the Qintianjian, existed almost without a break for about 2,000 years. Watching the sky was a state monopoly. In some periods, private study of the sky was punishable by law, because knowledge of cycles was considered a matter of power.
Tibet. There, astrology and medicine went hand in hand for centuries. The Men-Tsee-Khang institute, founded in 1916 by the 13th Dalai Lama, still operates today and publishes an official almanac every year.
Japan. There was a separate state bureau, the Onmyoryo. Its best-known figure, Abe no Seimei, who lived from roughly 921 to 1005, became a figure of national stature.
England. The date of Elizabeth I's coronation, 15 January 1559, was chosen by her court astrologer, John Dee. Not a church feast day, as had been the custom, but a calculated moment. More on this man below, because his case shows well what astrology was used for in practice.
The Holy Roman Empire. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler worked at the court of Emperor Rudolf II. Kepler, the same Kepler whose laws of planetary motion are taught at school, drew up charts for the military commander Wallenstein.
The Maya. The Dresden Codex contains tables of the movement of Venus, worked out with a precision that only modern calculations have been able to check.
John Dee was a Renaissance man in the purest sense. Mathematician, geographer, navigator, owner of the largest private library in England. He advised English seafarers and brought the very phrase British Empire into use. At the same time, he was the queen's court astrologer and her intelligence agent. According to the well-known story, he signed his reports to her with two zeros and a seven, a sign for the eyes that watch for her. The original 007, centuries before Ian Fleming.
Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, came to the throne in 1558 at the age of 25 and reigned for more than 44 years.
Dee chose the coronation date. By calculation, not by the church calendar.
What exactly did he use? The tropical zodiac. The 7 visible planets; the outer ones weren't known yet. Houses in the Porphyry system. Planetary dignities, meaning rulership and exaltation. And the fixed stars, in particular Regulus, the star of kings. His sources were Arabic, read in Latin translation: Al-Biruni and Abu Ma'shar. In other words, the Persian and Arabic line.
The branch he worked in is called electional astrology: choosing the moment to begin something.
And the key point. He didn't choose a date that was good in the abstract, but one matched to Elizabeth's own birth chart. He worked with two charts together.
The idea behind it is simple. A beginning has a character, and that character passes into everything that grows from it.
At first, people used it to know when to sow crops, when the rainy season would come and when a drought would set in. They were tracking cycles.
Later they went deeper and began tracking other cycles and omens, recording them and comparing them with each other.
In the same way, they identified character traits. People born under a certain sky, when the planets stood in a certain way, had certain qualities. And people born an hour later had different ones.
They simply followed the lives of emperors and members of royal families, and all of it was passed on as knowledge. Every high-ranking family used to have its own astrologer, who kept a record of their whole life and passed that knowledge on from teacher to student. That's how astrology took shape over centuries and millennia.
So it's a finely tuned system of correspondences, built on mathematics and on tracking the lives of real people. The stars always move the same way. The mathematics behind it is clear and exact. And the position of a star in the sky gives a person certain qualities.
That's why there's a rising sign, the Ascendant. There are the lunar nodes. There are the nakshatras. And there are others. Here are the 20 main ones.
Ascendant, also called Lagna. The point of the sky that was rising over the horizon at the moment of birth. It changes about every 2 hours. It's where a person starts from: their first reaction and their outward appearance.
Moon sign. In the Vedic tradition it's considered more important than the Sun sign. It governs the mind, perception and emotional background.
Sun sign. The core of the personality, the will, the relationship with one's father and with authority.
Houses. The 12 sectors of the chart. The first for the body and character, the second for money and speech, the seventh for marriage, the tenth for profession.
House rulers. The planet that owns the sign at the start of a house links two areas of life together. Many of the most specific conclusions are built on this.
Nakshatras. The 27 lunar mansions. The 360 degrees are divided into 27 segments of 13 degrees 20 minutes each. The Moon goes round the zodiac in a little over 27 days, so it spends about a day in each mansion. Each has its own name, ruling planet, symbol and set of qualities.
Padas. A quarter of a nakshatra, 3 degrees 20 minutes. There are 108 padas in all.
The lunar nodes, Rahu and Ketu. Not planets, but the points where the Moon's orbit crosses the plane of the ecliptic. That's where eclipses happen. Rahu stands for the pull forward and for everything foreign and new. Ketu, for what has already been worked through.
Exaltation and debilitation. Each planet has a sign where it works at its peak, and a sign where it works at a deficit.
Retrograde motion. A planet's apparent movement backwards. The planet's theme turns inward and calls for review.
Aspects. Angles between planets. They show which functions work together and which are in conflict.
Yogas. Stable planetary combinations, each with its own name and a result described over centuries.
Vargas, divisional charts. The ninth, Navamsha, shows marriage and inner strength. The tenth, Dashamsha, shows profession.
Dashas, the Vimshottari system of periods. Life is divided into periods, each ruled by its own planet. They're calculated from the Moon's nakshatra at birth. This is the answer to the question of when to act and when to wait.
Transits. The current positions of the planets relative to the birth chart. Dashas set the theme of a period; transits set the dates within it.
Sade Sati. Saturn's passage through the 3 signs around the natal Moon. About 7 and a half years, recurring roughly once every 30 years.
Saturn return. Saturn comes back to its birth position at about 29 and again at about 58. Classic turning points.
Tithi, the lunar day. The phase of the Moon at the moment of birth, one of 30 divisions of the lunar month.
Vara, the weekday, and its planet.
Panchanga. A set of five elements of the day: vara, tithi, nakshatra, yoga and karana. The classical Vedic almanac, still used to choose days for important undertakings.
Especially now, with computers arriving over the past 30 years, astrology has become heavily computerised. All these systems, which scholars, priests and Brahmins once worked out by hand, are now calculated in seconds.
And they were written down differently, in different countries and different traditions.
Mesopotamian and Babylonian. The omen collection Enuma Anu Enlil contains about 7,000 lines of omens.
Egyptian. The decans, a division of the sky into 36 segments of 10 days each.
Vedic, Jyotish. The sidereal zodiac, the nakshatras, the system of periods.
Hellenistic, Greek. This is where the scheme of 12 houses and the doctrine of aspects were born, in the form the West still uses today.
Persian and Arabic, ilm an-nujum. This tradition developed techniques for judging each year in turn, the conjunctions of the great planets as a way to assess historical eras, and the Arabic lots.
Chinese. Two large branches. BaZi, the Eight Characters: 4 pillars from the year, month, day and hour. And Zi Wei Dou Shu, Purple Star astrology, a star chart of 108 stars across 12 palaces.
Tibetan. Two systems at once. Kartsi, which came from India and works with the planets. And Nagtsi, which came from China and works with the elements and the animal cycle.
Japanese, Onmyodo. A blend of Chinese calculation and local tradition, formalised as a state office.
Maya and Mesoamerican. The Tzolkin, a sacred count of 260 days, and the Venus tables.
Jewish, mazalot. The 12 signs in the Jewish calendar and in rabbinic literature.
European, medieval and Renaissance. The return of Greek and Arabic material to Europe through translations, and its development at royal courts.
All of them used these observations for thousands of years.
That's a very simple, general picture of how astrology came about.
The Vedas themselves say that this knowledge came to us, in the form of the Vedas, from the source itself. From the Creator, who first passed it to Brahma. The parampara, an unbroken teacher-to-student lineage, that came from Vivasvan, the Sun god, was lost, and so it came to us from Brahma through Narada. And through Vyasadeva, who wrote down much of the Vedas.
If we look at what has been written down and dated, the picture is this.
The Vedanga Jyotisha, attributed to the sage Lagadha, is the earliest known text on Jyotish. Some scholars date its content to around 1400 or 1200 BCE; others think the version that has come down to us is later, around 700 or 600 BCE. The dating is worked out from the text itself, from the position of the solstice points relative to the nakshatras that it records.
The Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, attributed to the sage Parashara, father of Vyasadeva, is the main text that the great majority of Jyotish astrologers still work from. The surviving version is dated in different ways, from the 5th to the 12th century of the Common Era (CE); there's no single view.
Varahamihira, in the 6th century CE, gathered and preserved earlier material in his works Brihat Jataka and Brihat Samhita.
In this view, the knowledge came down from above, and in Vedic times it was remembered. Then came Kali Yuga, the present age of decline in Hindu cosmology. People began to forget, and in places the knowledge was lost outright, because great wars took place. The Mahabharata describes the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. There were also huge climate catastrophes that wiped out a vast layer of knowledge.
So in some places it came from above, and in others it's reverse engineering: working out how something is built from a finished example. People knew it worked, some charts survived, and they kept returning to them. Some of it also came down to us from earlier civilisations.
So astrology, as a body of knowledge, reached us from several directions.
On top of that, the sky has stayed the same for thousands of years. It doesn't change.
There's a clock on our wall, with a face. In the same way, there's a celestial clock: stars that always move at the same angles and through the same degrees.
In the past, people didn't sit scrolling a feed. Their attention span wasn't 3 or 9 seconds. They could spend a whole life keeping the astrological charts of, say, an entire royal family, and then pass that knowledge on to their students.
It's an enormous body of work. And now, especially with artificial intelligence, that work can be sorted and refined even further, helping us get far more precise calculations.
And in the Convergence Map, this data is also laid side by side. We look for exactly these points of correspondence, of contact, of sameness, for you. Confirming some things and ruling others out.
Interestingly, the I Ching highlights one thing. The Chinese metaphysics of BaZi highlights another. Jyotish highlights a third. And the descriptive method of the Arcana highlights a fourth, in very beautiful language.
Jyotish shows time best. Periods, their order, their length. What is ripening now and what is closed for now. Plus purpose, through the houses of knowledge, action and world view.
BaZi shows resources best. What material a person is made of, what they have in excess and what they lack. How they relate to money, work, power and change. The Day Pillar in BaZi gives a signal that no other system repeats.
The I Ching's system of 64 hexagrams, laid out across the centres of the body, shows mechanics best. How a person makes decisions. Where their energy goes. Where they act naturally and where they adapt to other people.
The 22 Major Arcana show the story best. Not mechanics and not time, but the script. Which theme repeats, which inner conflict a person goes through, and what language can name it so that the person recognises themselves.
Jyotish, meanwhile, is like higher mathematics, with a huge number of variables. The lunar nodes come into play, invisible planets such as Rahu and Ketu are added. There are oppositions. There's retrograde motion, planets moving backwards. There are Saturn returns.
And we find all of this. These correspondences.
Saturn. In the Arcana, it's the archetype of The Devil, number 15, while Saturn as a planet stands behind Arcanum 21, The World. In the hexagram system, it's the part of the yearly circle that begins at the winter solstice. In BaZi, Saturn is literally called the Earth Star, and in the chart it shows up through the Earth element. Earth in BaZi is stability, boundaries, accumulation, patience, slow results. In Jyotish, Saturn rules its own signs and its own nakshatras and brings slow, heavy but solid building, with a delayed reward.
Four different languages. The same content. Limitation, time, form, discipline, a late but lasting result.
And this is just one example. There are a great many like it. We find these correspondences and see that people described the same thing in different ways.
It's the same with numbers.
The numerals we write every day, 1, 2, 3, are called Arabic, but they were born in India. The Indian system, with zero and place value, reached Europe through Persian and Arab mathematicians. Al-Khwarizmi played a key role; the word algorithm comes from his name. That's why it's more correct to call them Hindu-Arabic numerals.
Then there are Roman numerals. One stroke, two strokes, three strokes, and then a different sign, a V. One, two, three, and after that 5 and 10 are written quite differently.
The same quantity. Two completely different systems of writing it. One suits arithmetic, the other an inscription on a building.
You can look at all of this from completely different angles.
Or take literature. If you read ancient Greek texts, then the Indian Vedas, and then the Christian scriptures, you'll see that a great many things repeat. They're told in the same terms, even though Mesopotamia may lie between them, or 8,000 years, 5,000 years or 2,000 years.
Stories repeat from millennium to millennium, only from different angles. Everything moves in cycles.
And this is astrology, the knowledge people have used for thousands of years.
Why were the pyramids built to one alignment? The sides of the Great Pyramid of Giza are aligned to the cardinal directions to within 4 minutes of arc, one fifteenth of a degree. The Pyramid of Khafre and the Red Pyramid at Dahshur are aligned almost as precisely, with the same tiny error in the same direction. In a 2018 paper, the engineer Glen Dash showed that this precision can be reached by a simple method: tracking the shadow of a vertical pole on the day of the equinox.
Now, about the Sphinx. Let me be precise here. The Sphinx doesn't face the Pole Star. It faces due east, towards the point where the Sun rises at the equinoxes. Twice a year, in spring and autumn, the Sun sets right by its shoulder, behind the Pyramid of Khafre. The Pole Star has nothing to do with it for another reason too. Because of precession, at the time of construction the role of pole star was played not by today's star but by Thuban, in the constellation Draco. And according to one theory, the northern shaft of the Great Pyramid was aimed at it.
Why are other pyramids, in Mexico for example, aligned too? The whole of Teotihuacan, all 20 square kilometres (8 square miles) of it, is turned about 15.5 degrees east of true north. Every street, every courtyard, every platform. Such uniformity across such an area means the standard was set centrally. Explanations differ. One links the orientation to the setting of the Pleiades. Another links it to sunset on 13 August and 30 April, because the longer interval between these dates is exactly 260 days, the length of the sacred calendar shared across Mesoamerica.
Some see the remains of earlier great civilisations scattered across our planet. Some lie underwater, like the structure off the coast of Yonaguni in Japan and the settlements on the floor of the Mediterranean. And people look for Atlantis even in the desert. In Mauritania there's the Richat Structure, known as the Eye of the Sahara. A huge, almost perfectly round ring about 40 kilometres (25 miles) across, with concentric circles. There are signs there, too, that water was once present.
This clarity and precision turns up everywhere, remarkably.
When we read different traditions, we see how they confirm one another. They speak, in different words and with different approaches, about the same thing. About the same stars that stood at certain angles, in certain houses, in BaZi's stems and branches, or in the arcana, and left their imprint on us.
We are part of this larger order.
Many people today believe we live in a matrix, a mathematical system written by a supreme programmer. And if you want to understand it, you need to start learning these keys, these meanings, these terms.
People used astrology in the past, and they use it now.
An honest caveat. There's no single worldwide figure, because nobody has surveyed the whole planet. But here's what there is.
The United States. According to Pew Research Center data for 2024, roughly 3 in 10 American adults consult astrology, tarot cards or fortune tellers at least once a year. Among women aged 18 to 49, about 4 in 10 believe in astrology.
The United Kingdom. Figures from different surveys vary widely, from a quarter to three quarters of the population, depending on how the question is asked.
India. By the industry's own estimates, about 80 per cent of Indians turn to astrology at least once in their lives. Comparing charts before marriage remains the norm there, not the exception. The astrology app market in India alone was estimated at about US$163 million in 2024 and is growing fast.
The global market for astrology services was estimated at about US$12.8 billion in 2021, with a projection of up to $22.8 billion by 2031.
Interestingly, according to surveys, more than 90 per cent of adults know their Sun sign. So almost everyone already has a way in.
A huge number of people use it, and they find value in it.
So if you think you can do without astrology, you're choosing to leave a powerful tool unused.
This knowledge was used by Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal in Assyria, by Vikramaditya and the Mughal emperors in India, by the emperors of China through their astronomical bureau, by the Dalai Lamas in Tibet, by Elizabeth I in England and by Rudolf II in the Holy Roman Empire. They built empires that lasted for centuries, relying in part on the advice of astrologers. If you think they were wrong and you don't need astrology, you're free to scroll on.
But if you want to rise above your conditioning, our system is one of the most powerful practices to help you do it.
So if you'd like your first analysis, to see how it really works in practice and judge for yourself whether it holds, all you need to do is send us your date, time and place of birth.
Then the 4 systems are calculated separately, each in its own language, without being adjusted to fit the others. Then the results are brought together in one table. Whatever has repeated independently in several systems becomes the core of your analysis. Whatever only one system said is marked separately and is not presented as the truth.
Observation. Comparison. Agreement. Confirmation. A practical conclusion.