By Victor M Fontane
In the West, many spiritual schools, let's call religions, spiritual teaching, centers, etc. tends to use images, statues, mantras and even some practices borrowed from the Far East. One of the practices used by the ancient masters for 17,000 years and more recently, in the Middle Ages, by Kings is Astrology. There are several types of astrologies but the most widely used in the West is the so-called Tropical Astrology which uses for its calculations the planets of our solar system and its electromagnetic effect on Earth and its humanity. Tropical astrology fixes the vernal point or March equinox in the northern hemisphere at 0 degrees as Aries and defines the rest of the zodiac from it.
Vedic Astrology has the notion of the connection between microcosm and macrocosm. However, they all detail our relationship with the rest of the Universe and how it impacts us because we are in the Universe and the Universe is in us. As the law of correspondence defines “as above, so below, the macrocosm is equal to the microcosm.
Vedic astrology relies primarily on the sidereal zodiac, which differs from the tropical zodiac used in Western (Hellenistic) astrology in that an ayanāṁśa adjustment is made for the gradual precession of the vernal equinox. Hindu astrology includes several nuanced sub-systems of interpretation and prediction with elements not found in Hellenistic astrology, such as its system of lunar mansions (Nakṣatra). It was only after the transmission of Hellenistic astrology that the order of planets in India was fixed in that of the seven-day week. Hellenistic astrology and astronomy also transmitted the twelve zodiacal signs beginning with Aries and the twelve astrological places beginning with the ascendant.
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