Is Astrology Useful?

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Is Astrology Useful?

-- Written by Subhash Kak

 

On a recent visit to Pennsylvania, at a convention center in a small town, I met participants of a two-week Jyotish workshop run by a well-known American Vedic astrologer. In addition to room and board expenses, each participant had paid $2,500 tuition to the instructor. When asked, they assured me they had got their money's worth.

 

Some of them were celebrities and, therefore, the tuition could not have been an issue. But not all were rich, and most were highly educated. One was a very high official in the federal government. Why did they pay this money and take leave from their jobs for two weeks knowing how strongly famous scientists have denounced astrology? What is the attraction of astrology? Is it useful?

 

Before I attempt to answer these questions, I would like to say that Indian astrology is becoming increasingly popular all over the world. This popularity may be because Western zodiacal signs are out of touch with their true constellation counterparts. The Western system uses the tropical zodiac, where the first day of spring is the starting point of the yearly cycle of the sun, but these signs are no longer the true ones due to the accumulated precession of the earth in the 2,000 years from the time the Western astrological system was formulated. In contrast, Indian astrology is sidereal (with respect to the fixed stars) and, therefore, it is in accord with the astronomical facts.

 

But being sidereal does not, in itself, make Indian astrology correct or useful. We all know the grounds on which the rationalists criticize astrology. For example: How can planets so far away influence the lives of individuals? It is rare for birth records to be reliable, so how good can predictions be if one remembers the dictum 'garbage in, garbage out'? Why should the moment of birth be critical in the destiny of an individual -- the increasing number of Caesarian babies are born at times convenient to the schedule of the obstetrician and not to cosmic logic? Also, there exist many different schools of interpretation of the charts, how does one know which one is correct, and which one is wrong?

 

But this criticism misses the essence of astrological analysis. It is not the predictions about the future that draw people to it. Indian astrology acknowledges that the future (if one could speak of one such thing written in the stars) can be changed by various interventions (upaya-s); also those who have found themselves are not subject to the whims of the stars anyway. Astrology is not about blind fate.

 

The main objective of an astrological chart is to define the psychological profile of the individual. This profile has a time element to it, which has cycles that run according to different astronomical periods. It is this time element that makes astrological analysis appealing to people.

 

The science of the last thirty or forty years has shown that indeed there are cycles in our life. But the planets do not influence the individual directly. Rather, the intricate clockwork of the universe is reflected in the periodicities of the astral bodies and the rhythms of life.

 

It is not the gravitational pull of the planet that causes a certain response, but an internal clock governed by the genes. We know this because in mutant organisms the internal clock exhibits periods that have no apparent astronomical basis. The cycles are apparently a genetic inheritance -- a result of the evolution over millions of years.

 

The most fundamental rhythms are matched to the periods of the sun or the moon. For example, the potato has a variation in its metabolic processes that is matched to the sidereal day, the 23-hour 56-minute period of rotation of the earth relative to the fixed stars.

 

The cicadas come in many species including ones that appear yearly in midsummer. The best known amongst the others are those that have 13-year and 17-year periods. The North American 17-year cicada spends 17 years as a juvenile form or nymph feeding underground on the sap of plant roots. Adults emerging from these nymphs in the same year spend a summer of song and mate, and the females lay their eggs. The young nymphs that hatch out burrow underground and disappear for the next 17 years.

 

There are quite precise biological clocks of 24-hour (according to the day), 24 hour 50 minutes (according to the lunar day since the moon rises roughly 50 minutes later every day) or its half representing the tides, 29.5 days (the period from one new moon to the next), and the year. Monthly rhythms, averaging 29.5 days, are reflected in the reproductive cycles of many marine plants and those of animals. There are others that correspond to the periods of the planets or the periods of their conjunctions.

 

The 11-year sunspot cycle and its double the 22-year magnetic cycle are correlated with the 22-year cycle of drought in the Western United States. The interval between two perfectly straight alignments between the Earth, the moon, and the sun responsible for the solar eclipse cycle is 18.6 years; this period is the drought cycle of the American Midwest east of the Rockies and west of the Mississippi.

 

Thus fiddler crabs, in their natural habitat on the shore, burrow themselves during high tide, emerging when the tide recedes to feed, mate, and challenge each other. When these crabs are removed to the laboratory and held in an incubator with constant conditions, they still run around in their containers during the time of each low tide.

 

In humans the menstrual period has by tradition been taken to correspond to the moon's motion; in fact 'menses' means lunar month. New research supports this:

 

 

In a study of a number of women with variable onset of menstrual periods, artificial illumination of the bedroom through the 14th to 17th nights following the onset of menstruation resulted in the regularization of the period, with the period length coming very close to 29.5 days, the natural synodic month. That this period is a biologically significant one for the human species is further suggested by the fact that the average duration of pregnancy (from ovulation to birth) in the human is rather precisely nine 29.53 synodic months.

Encyclopaedia Britannica (1994), Animal Behaviour, p. 761

 

But there is a distinction between lunar and freerunning circalunar cycles. A lunar cycle is in step with the motions of the moon. The menstrual cycle is a freerunning cycle with the same period as that of the moon. Perhaps the entrainment to the lunar cycle was triggered by moonlight. In modern life under artificial lights, the direct correlation with the moon's motion has been lost.

 

The fundamental circadian rhythm for us is not the 24-hour one related to the motion of the sun but rather the 24 hour 50 minute one according to the period of the moon. This 24-hour-50-minute clock was discovered by the moderns only about 30 years ago in experiments on a blind squirrel monkey. The activity of this monkey was recorded night and day for a period of three years and it was discovered that her rhythms drifted later each day by an average of about 46 minutes. The monkey kept her own time, unaffected by the activities around her. Since then it has been found that our inner clock is synchronized with the motion of the moon and it is reset continually by sunlight.

 

We may assume that, with their emphasis on time bound rituals and the calendar, the ancients had discovered many of the biological periods. This would include the 24-hour-50-minute circadian rhythm, the connection of the menstrual cycle with the motions of the moon, the life cycles of various plants, and the semimonthly estrus cycle of sheep, the three-week cycles of cattle and pigs, and the six-month cycle of dogs.

 

Apart from biological rhythms of the human and astronomical cycles, we suspect that ancient understanding was also influenced by rhythms of the kind seen in the deep-sea lily near Japan:

 

 

This echinoderm liberates its sex cells once every year in October at about 3 PM on the day of one of the moon's quarters. In succeeding years the time of sex cell release changes, among the moon's two quarters, first-third-first, to progressively slightly earlier dates in October. The triplets are repeated until about the first of the month whereupon the following year it jumps abruptly to near the end of the month to start the advancing triplet progression again. The result is an 18-year cycle, which is essentially the period of regression of the moon's orbital plane.

Encyclopaedia Britannica (1994), Animal Behaviour, p. 761.

 

Having seen rhythms matched closely to the principal astronomical periods, the ancients further assumed that there were less obvious cycles that were matched to the motions of the other heavenly bodies.

 

The gestation periods for mammals also have intriguing relationships to astronomical numbers. Perhaps such connections were the basis for marking out certain animals as special symbols. The averages of some of the gestation periods are:

 

 

ass = 365 days

baboon = 183 days

cow = 284 days

dog = 61 days

horse = 336 days

human = 284 days

An ancient Indian text uses the ass as a symbol of the year. Likewise the horse with its average gestation period equal to the nakshatra year of 336 days (for 28 nakshatras) is a natural symbol for the sidereal year. The baboon's gestation period explains its sacredness to the Egyptians. The sacredness of the cow may be due, in part, to its gestation period being identical to that of the human.

 

Apart from inner astronomical cycles, astrology also uses the idea that the outer universe is mirrored in the inner cosmos. This opens up the possibility of explaining inner states in terms of happenings outside, and vice versa. It also suggests upaya-s, some of which depend on personal effort. If calendars harmonize the motions of the sun and the moon, yoga is the harmonization of the motions of the inner planets of the body.

 

We all know of astonishing anecdotal accounts of fortune telling; then there are the most incredible coincidences, some of which are described in my book The Wishing Tree (2001). But here I shall not take up the question of predictions.

 

People care for astrology because it provides a time-varying psychological chart. The Jyotishi is, in reality, a psychological analyst, using a psychology which is much more subtle than the static psychological systems that arose in the last century. Astrological counseling holds the mirror to the individual, helping him find a measure of the self.

 

Should astrology be taught in the universities? Certainly, yes! If religion and psychology and theories of Freud can be taught, so should astrology. It can make accessible old literature of all civilizations. A history of astrology tells us much about the human mind.

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