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Every essay on this blog, put plainly for somebody who has never met astrology, Sanskrit or the Indian calendar before. About two minutes each. Every one links through to the full piece, which has the working, the sources and the sky.

2 min The escape hatches, In the classical astrology handbooks this essay reads, a fault and the conditions that release it are printed together, in the same place and by the... myth-vs-method 2 min Purva Ashadha: the water that does not lose, The twentieth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is named "the one that cannot be overcome", and then hands that boast to water, to a bow, and to a... nakshatra-files 2 min The book that moved Mercury, In 1500 a Kerala astronomer called Nilakantha found that the standard Indian method for locating Mercury and Venus was built on the wrong centre... tradition 2 min Asking for the reasoning, When an astrologer tells you something about your life, ask how he sees it in the chart, because a statement without its reasoning cannot be checked... decisions 2 min The eighteen-year wobble, Eclipses come in pairs a fortnight apart, in short seasons about 173 days apart, because two points where the moon's orbit crosses the earth's slide... computed-sky 2 min Mula: the root, aimed at the centre of the galaxy, The nineteenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is a pair of stars at the tip of the scorpion's tail, and directly behind them, about 27,000 light... nakshatra-files 1 min The fortnight for the dead, Pitru paksha, the fortnight Hindu families keep for their ancestors, runs from 26 September to 10 October in 2026, and unlike every other stretch of... almanac 1 min Jyeshtha: the eldest, and the rival of Mars, The eighteenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is marked by Antares, a star so large that light needs most of an hour to cross it, and the essay... nakshatra-files 2 min Anuradha: the star of company, The seventeenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is a short arc of four stars in the head of the scorpion that are genuinely related to one... nakshatra-files 2 min Vishakha: the forked branch, The sixteenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations sits in a patch of sky that two old traditions read two different ways, its Sanskrit name means... nakshatra-files 2 min Swati: the one that stands apart, The fifteenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is named for Arcturus, a star that is visibly leaving its neighbours behind, and the essay follows... nakshatra-files 2 min Chitra: the jewel that is two stars, The fourteenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is pinned to one bright star, Spica, and Spica is really two stars going round each other every... nakshatra-files 2 min Hasta: five stars make a hand, The thirteenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is a small four-cornered box of stars that almost anybody can find, the tradition calls it the... nakshatra-files 2 min Uttara Phalguni: the second bed, The twelfth of the moon's twenty-seven stations sits at the tail of the constellation Leo, and the essay is written as a contract, because this... nakshatra-files 2 min Purva Phalguni: the hammock, The eleventh of the moon's twenty-seven stations is drawn in the handbooks as the two front legs of a bed, and the essay takes that seriously: rest... nakshatra-files 2 min Magha: the throne, and the dead who sat on it, The tenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is marked by Regulus, a bright star that is bright partly because a dead companion handed over its... nakshatra-files 2 min Ashlesha: the coil, The ninth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is a small knot of five faint stars that make the head of the longest constellation in the sky, and its... nakshatra-files 1 min Pushya: the nourisher, The eighth of the moon's 27 stations is a faint grey smudge in the dimmest constellation of the zodiac, and two sets of people who had never met both... nakshatra-files 2 min Punarvasu: the two who come back, The seventh of the moon's 27 stations is the bright pair of stars in Gemini that vanishes behind the sun for part of every year, and its Sanskrit... nakshatra-files 2 min Ardra, and a star that is dying while we watch, The sixth of the moon's 27 stations is attached to Betelgeuse, the orange star in the shoulder of Orion, which changes brightness while you watch it... nakshatra-files 2 min Mrigashira: the head that keeps turning, The fifth of the moon's 27 stations is a small triangle of faint stars in the head of Orion, and the name it carries runs from a deer, through... nakshatra-files 2 min Rohini, and the moon who would not keep the rota, An old story about the moon favouring one wife out of 27 turns out to be a neat description of two things anyone can see in the sky, and the star at... nakshatra-files 2 min Ekadashi, and why two dates circulate, The most widely kept Hindu fast falls on the eleventh lunar day, and two traditions check whether that lunar day is clean at two different minutes of... almanac 2 min Bhakoot, the quiet veto, Bhakoot is a marriage-matching rule worth seven of thirty-six points that gives a couple everything or nothing depending on the gap between their two... myth-vs-method 2 min The family group chat, a field guide, The astrology message that lands in your family group at 6:41 in the morning comes in about three standard shapes, each with a piece of information... screen-time 2 min The day that never happens, Indian dates are set by lunar days rather than calendar dates, and every so often a lunar day is short enough to slip between two sunrises, so no... almanac 1 min The meme is doing doctrine's job, Astrology jokes are teaching a whole picture of the sky to people who never sat down to learn one, and the picture they teach is not the one Indian... screen-time 1 min Nadi dosha, and the marriages it ends, Two words spoken over a marriage proposal can end it, and what they refer to is a table of twenty-seven names sorted into three columns. myth-vs-method 1 min Your Co-Star is not your kundli, Two very different products are sold under the word "astrology" on the same app store, and the popular Western ones and the Indian ones compute... screen-time 2 min Krittika: the blade and the flame, Go outside, count the stars in the most famous little cluster in the sky, and then find out why almost every culture on earth calls it seven and sees... nakshatra-files 2 min The sun-sign column, The daily horoscope sorted into twelve boxes was not handed down by any tradition; it was worked out by British newspaper editors between 1930 and... myth-vs-method 2 min The sign in your bio, The star sign on a dating profile is doing three different jobs at once, and one of them quietly decides who gets to see you before anybody has said... screen-time 2 min The day that happens twice, Indian festivals are counted in lunar days rather than calendar dates, and when a lunar day is long enough to be running at two sunrises in a row... almanac 1 min The temple committee's calendar, Outside India, a temple's festival dates are settled in a committee meeting, working from an almanac it inherited and a hall it has to book, which is... elsewhere 2 min Bharani: the bearer, A letter to anyone who looked up their birth details, saw the word death printed beside the sky-slice called Bharani, and shut the page in fright. nakshatra-files 2 min Someone else's chart, Before you send a photograph of somebody else's birth details to an astrologer, ask them, because whatever comes back will change how you treat a... decisions 2 min Sunrise at sixty degrees north, Indian fasts and festivals are named after whichever lunar day is running at sunrise, and in the far north that rule hands you either a sunrise at... elsewhere 2 min Thirty-six points, and what they actually weigh, The marriage compatibility score families quote is out of thirty-six because its eight parts are worth one to eight points, and two of those parts... myth-vs-method 1 min Ekadashi across the date line, The same monthly fast falls on a Thursday in Auckland and a Wednesday in California, and the two sunrises that decide those dates are only three... elsewhere 2 min The Kerala school, and calculus before Newton, Between about 1350 and 1600, a chain of teachers and pupils living a short walk apart on one river in Kerala worked out endless sums that give you pi... tradition 2 min The app's city menu, Every Indian almanac app holds a city in a settings field, that city decides which sunrise the app asks its questions about, and the sunrise decides... elsewhere 2 min The many schools of jyotisha, Indian astrology is not one system but several, each with its own rules and vocabulary, so two practitioners can agree about where every planet sits... tradition 2 min Night shift, day fast, Indian fasts are named after whichever lunar day is running at the minute the sun comes up, so a night-shift worker is often awake for the one minute... elsewhere 2 min The two-clock kitchen, Millions of families abroad keep two clocks going at once, one for where they live and one for India, and the daily sums that arrangement demands are... elsewhere 1 min Your festival, eight thousand kilometres later, Indian festivals are fixed to the moon rather than to a calendar date, and because the moon's timings are the same for the whole planet while sunset... elsewhere 2 min Ashwini: the first spark, Indian tradition divides the sky into 27 parts, and this piece goes outside at four in the morning to find the first one and see what it actually... nakshatra-files 2 min Finding the exact moment a tithi turns, The Indian almanac's lunar day ends at an exact instant that no table lists, and you can find that instant to within a second or two using two lines... computed-sky 1 min Which day is your fast, actually, Indian observances are pinned to lunar days that refuse to line up with calendar dates, and one short rule decides which date gets the name... almanac 1 min Aryabhata says the earth turns, An Indian astronomer wrote in the year 499 that the stars only look like they move because the earth is turning, and the tradition that copied his... tradition 2 min Counting days since the beginning, Indian astronomy has kept its own running count of days for well over a thousand years, and you can work today's number out with two multiplications... computed-sky 2 min The twelve months and the stars they are named for, Each of the twelve Indian lunar months is named after a star, because the month was once named for whichever star the moon was standing beside on the... almanac 1 min Amanta and purnimanta, Indian lunar months are cut in two different places, at the full moon in the north and at the no-moon night in the west and south, so the same... almanac 2 min Reading a muhurta table without panic, The grid of timed windows on an Indian almanac sheet looks like a list of secrets, and it is really three kinds of arithmetic stacked in one table. almanac 2 min Raising the ascendant by hand, The rising sign on a chart is the answer to one sum, and this essay does that sum for a real place and a real minute, in the open, then checks it... computed-sky 2 min Why two panchangs disagree, When two Indian almanacs put the same festival on different days, there are four honest reasons for it, and every one of them is bookkeeping rather... almanac 2 min Your chart, their hopes, When a parent quotes the family astrologer at you, there is almost always a plainer sentence underneath, and answering that one goes better than... inheritance 1 min Sidereal time, or what the sky reads on your clock, The earth takes 23 hours 56 minutes to turn once, not 24, and this essay carries one birth moment from a wall clock to the clock the sky actually... computed-sky 2 min The clipping your grandmother saved, The newspaper column, the notebook of family dates and the letter from a monastery that turn up in a cleared cupboard are records of what one person... inheritance 2 min Believing a little, You are allowed to keep part of your family's astrology and decline part of it, and that middle position is an honest one rather than a failure to... inheritance 2 min Why the arithmetic is open, An astrology company promises that the calculation behind every chart it makes will be checkable by a stranger with a laptop, and sets out what that... founder-notes 1 min How we set a price, Before anything is on sale, the founder of an astrology company writes down the three things he will take money for, the two he will not, the exact... founder-notes 2 min Why the sundial and the clock disagree, A sundial and a clock can sit more than a quarter of an hour apart, and this essay works out exactly why, by hand, by separating the two things that... computed-sky 2 min Asking to see your own chart, Asking your family to show you the birth chart they keep for you is a request to read, not a promise to believe, and the evening goes better if you... inheritance 2 min The day number that every ephemeris agrees on, Before any astronomy program looks up a planet, it throws your calendar date away and replaces it with one running count of days, and you can do that... computed-sky 2 min The first veto, When a family refuses a match, a date or a job start because of a birth chart, the stated reason has almost always come from outside the house, and... inheritance 2 min The sceptic at the puja, Standing through a family religious ceremony you do not believe in is not lying, because a lie needs a claim and nobody in that room is asking you to... inheritance 2 min The kundli in the locker, The birth chart your family had made for you is a family object before it is anything else, and asking to see your own is a fair thing to ask. inheritance 2 min Should I leave this job, One woman puts the same question about leaving her job five different ways before she books an hour with an astrologer, and four of the five quietly... decisions 2 min The free kundli, A free birth-chart report costs a website almost nothing to produce, which is why it runs to hundreds of pages, and why the thing that actually has a... myth-vs-method 2 min Nobody wrote down the time, If nobody in your family recorded the hour you were born, a date and a place still buy you most of a chart, and it is better to say so plainly than... decisions 2 min Making a planet go backwards, Mars never actually moves backwards, and you can prove it with two circles, four published numbers and a calculator, which will also tell you the day... computed-sky 2 min What a birth chart actually computes, A birth chart is ten numbers plus a list of decisions somebody made, and everything else printed on the page is those ten numbers sorted into boxes. computed-sky 2 min Why there is no daily horoscope, The most requested feature at an Indian astrology company is a daily horoscope, and the founder explains, properly rather than dismissively, why it... founder-notes 2 min The table you have never used, Before printed times, people told the hour by standing a short stick in the ground and measuring its shadow in finger-widths, and you can still do it... almanac 2 min How to read a panchang, A panchang is the Indian almanac sheet crammed with tiny print, and once you know that its day starts at sunrise instead of midnight, the whole page... almanac 2 min The guarantee nobody has to keep, A guarantee in ordinary trade is a promise with a standard, a testing period and a remedy attached to it, and the astrology sentences that sound like... myth-vs-method 2 min Your birth details, The date, time and place of your birth work almost like a name for you, so the founder of an astrology company sets out the little his blog holds... founder-notes 2 min Your chart has five doshas, A sales call that finds five faults in a birth chart, gives you until tomorrow evening, offers three fixes at a bundle price and promises to redo... myth-vs-method 2 min The gemstone question, The oldest Indian chapter on gemstones is a guide to not being cheated when you buy one, and the modern prescription of a single stone for a single... myth-vs-method 1 min Sky in the Rigveda, and the temptation to over-read it, India's oldest book of hymns does contain some real sky, but it is a small amount, and for six hundred years readers have been finding much more in... tradition 2 min The recording question, Ask before you book whether you may record your consultation, because the exact words are what you will lose first, and the way a practitioner... decisions 2 min When to stop the session, A paid astrology session can turn into a sales pitch across four or five sentences, and the useful skill is not spotting it but knowing how to pay in... decisions 2 min The refusal list, The founder of an astrology company writes down every way it could make money and will not, along with the exact pressure that would one day tempt... founder-notes 2 min Second opinions, Asking a second astrologer can be the most useful money you spend or the start of a hunt for the answer you already wanted, and the difference is... decisions 2 min Building a year planner from a panchang, A family's whole year of fasts, festivals and lunar birthdays can be copied out of the Indian almanac onto a single sheet of paper in one afternoon... almanac 2 min How to choose an astrologer, You cannot judge a reading by whether it came true, so judge the room instead: the price, the first five minutes, and what happens when you try to... decisions 2 min The reading that fits everyone, Some sentences sound like they are about you but are really about almost everybody, and once you can spot them you can tell the useful part of a... myth-vs-method 2 min What an honest reading looks like, A checklist for what a fair astrology consultation should look like, starting with the customer's own decision and ending with the astrologer... founder-notes 1 min The book you could carry in your head, The main old Indian handbook on birth charts is tiny, twenty-eight chapters and a little over four hundred verses, and being that small is both why... tradition 1 min Five days of Diwali, and their tithi anchors, The five days of Diwali are pinned to five lunar days that follow one another without a gap, yet the five festivals often fail to land on five dates... almanac 1 min Varahamihira, and a century that can be pinned down, Almost every famous old Indian book about the sky has an author nobody can date, and Varahamihira is the one exception, because he wrote three lines... tradition 2 min The question you have been avoiding, People often book a reading to ask about one thing and spend the hour circling a completely different thing they have not been able to say out loud. decisions 2 min Abhijit, the window at noon, The midday window printed on Indian almanac sheets is made by one division sum, the daylight cut into 15 equal shares with the middle share taken... almanac 1 min The sixty-year wheel, Indian years carry names as well as numbers, taken in turn from a fixed list of sixty that keeps going round, and this year's name is Parabhava. almanac 1 min The oldest calendar we have, The oldest surviving Indian book about the sky is a short calendar manual whose whole job was to say which day a ritual fell on, and dating it... tradition 2 min The verse in the middle of the page, Indian technical books were written deliberately short so students could memorise them, which means almost everything they actually teach lives in... tradition 2 min Entering the Hora Shastra by a side door, How to get through a huge, badly organised classical astrology book: skip the opening, enter at one of two better places, and keep a notebook of... tradition 2 min The slow clock of precession, The earth spins like a slowing top, and its axis takes about 26,000 years to trace one full circle in the sky, which is why the pole star has not... computed-sky 2 min Rahu kaal, without the fear, Rahu kaal, the daily window many Indian families avoid for starting anything new, is nothing more complicated than the day's daylight cut into eight... almanac 1 min How to take notes, If you try to write down everything an astrologer says, you will end up with pages that mean nothing and an hour you were never really in, so write... decisions 2 min Keeping a decision journal, If you write four lines before you see an astrologer and three lines afterwards, then a year later the page will tell you what was really said and... decisions 2 min Navamsha as a division problem, The navamsha, the second chart Indian astrologers read after the birth chart, is produced by dividing one number twice, and you can do both divisions... computed-sky 2 min Ten minutes of doubt, If nobody is sure of your birth time to better than ten minutes, most of a birth chart does not care at all, two parts of it care a great deal, and... computed-sky 2 min Mercury retrograde comes to India, The warning that everything goes wrong while Mercury is moving backwards came to India from Europe within living memory, and India's own scoring... myth-vs-method 2 min A Greek book in Sanskrit verse, One of the most quoted early books of Indian astrology survives in a single damaged bundle of palm leaves in Nepal, and the two dates everybody... tradition 2 min Where are the intellectuals?, Educated Indians use astrology in private and laugh at it in public, and that gap emptied the field of scholars and left the microphone to whoever... founder-notes 1 min The weekday, and where seven came from, The weekday is the one part of the Indian almanac everybody already trusts, and it is also the newest part of it, with an order that was manufactured... almanac 2 min The century the zodiac arrived, The twelve zodiac signs, the twelve houses, the idea of aspects and the seven-day week all came into India from the Greek world in the first few... tradition 2 min The palm-leaf reading, In a palm-leaf reading, the leaf said to hold your life story is found by putting statements to you for an hour or two until one leaf has agreed with... myth-vs-method 1 min Sunrise is a decision, not an observation, There is no single moment called sunrise, only four different moments that people have good reasons to call sunrise, and at Ujjain on one August... computed-sky 1 min Eight annas for the coming year, In the nineteenth century the Hindu almanac stopped being handwork and became a printed product with a company's name on it. That fixed some things... tradition 2 min What to bring, Before you pay anybody to read your birth chart, spend one evening finding out where your birth time actually came from, and write one page about the... decisions 2 min Pitru dosha, and the debt you are told you inherited, Pitru dosha is a modern name for the idea that your dead ancestors are unhappy and that this is why your life is stuck, and the reason it is so hard... myth-vs-method 2 min Against engagement, The founder of an astrology company explains why he will not try to raise the number almost every product in the world is built to raise, how many... founder-notes 2 min Kaal sarp: anatomy of a modern fear, A flaw that frightens people today cannot be found in the classical astrology books it borrows its authority from, and the pattern it names takes... myth-vs-method 1 min One thousand and thirty-one aphorisms, A second, quite different way of reading an Indian birth chart survives in a book so short and so tightly written that nobody can use it without a... tradition 1 min The equation of centre, Every calculation of where the moon is starts with a pretend moon that moves at one steady speed, and a single line of arithmetic, the equation of... computed-sky 1 min Comment-section jyotisha, Sort the replies under a big astrology post into kinds and almost nobody turns out to be arguing about whether astrology is true; most people are... screen-time 2 min Astrology and the anxious mind, Checking your horoscope can genuinely settle a worried mind, and it can also quietly take over that mind, and one simple test tells you which is... decisions 2 min Brahmagupta's chapter of faults, In the year 628 an Indian astronomer gave a whole chapter of his book to listing another astronomer's mistakes, in verse, and finished by saying the... tradition 2 min Four house systems, one birth moment, Four different rules for slicing a birth chart into its twelve sections are run on the very same birth moment, and the essay measures exactly how far... computed-sky 2 min Who was Parashara?, The huge old book at the centre of Indian astrology carries an ancient sage's name, but many hands assembled it over centuries, and that makes it... tradition 2 min A child's chart, A short line about a baby's character, read out from a chart while the baby is a week old and asleep, can still be shaping how a family sees him at... decisions 2 min Solar months, and the twelve sankrantis, Six parts of India count their months by the sun rather than the moon, starting each month at the moment the sun crosses into the next sign of the... almanac 2 min Everyone in India is on Allahabad time, Every clock in India is set to one line of longitude near Allahabad, so almost every town's sky runs minutes ahead of or behind its own clock, and a... computed-sky 2 min Computed, not composed, Instead of promising to stay honest, a company builds honesty into its software as things the system is simply unable to do. founder-notes 2 min Asking about money first, The fee is the one thing you can settle before you spend anything, so ask for it in writing before you book, and treat the way the answer arrives as... decisions 2 min The mangal dosha panic, A rule used to screen marriage matches flags close to half of everybody, and the tradition's own list of exceptions usually arrives only after the... myth-vs-method 1 min The tilt that sets the seasons, The earth's axis leans by 23 degrees 26 minutes and 9 seconds of arc, that lean is slowly shrinking, and this essay takes one birth chart and works... computed-sky 2 min Learning this yourself, If you want to learn Indian astrology yourself, start with the calendar and the arithmetic rather than with what the planets are said to mean... decisions 2 min Rudraksha, from tree to invoice, A rudraksha bead is the dried stone of a blue fruit, the "faces" it is priced by are the seed chambers inside it, and the ladder of prices built on... myth-vs-method 2 min The arithmetic of Vimshottari, The best known Indian system for dividing a life into named stretches of time is long division: 120 years split into nine unequal shares, with your... computed-sky 2 min The notification, considered as a sentence, The daily astrology message that lands on your phone is a short sentence built to a fixed pattern, finished before the morning it talks about, and... screen-time 2 min Disagreeing with your chart, An astrologer's sentence about your life is one person's judgement rather than a message from the sky, so you are allowed to say you do not accept... decisions 2 min Fear is not guidance, A four-sentence sales message is taken apart word by word to show how frightening somebody is done without telling a single lie. founder-notes 1 min An encyclopedia that happens to include astrology, The biggest book by India's most famous classical astrologer is mostly about wells, houses, rain, orchards, animals and gems, and the chapters on... tradition 2 min The ledger nobody keeps, Astrologers make public forecasts about matches, films and elections with their names and the date printed alongside, and nobody anywhere keeps a... myth-vs-method 2 min Why every astrology app is purple, Nearly every astrology app wears the same purple, gold and star-dot outfit, and that outfit is stitched from three borrowed promises, none of which... screen-time 2 min Bring a decision, not a fear, If you go to an astrologer, take a real choice you have to make, not a vague worry, because only one of the two can actually be worked on. decisions 2 min Twenty-seven before twelve, For a thousand years and more, India divided the sky into 27 star stations and had no zodiac signs at all, and that older system is still doing half... tradition 1 min How we screen astrologers, The founder of an astrology company writes down the test every astrologer will have to pass before the company lists him, the three kinds of person... founder-notes 2 min Sade sati: a field guide, The dreaded seven and a half year period in Indian astrology is the slow planet Saturn crossing three of the twelve zodiac signs, and at any given... myth-vs-method 2 min Checking the calendar too often, Opening a calendar or astrology app 40 times a day is not a silly habit, it is a habit that works, and the essay sets out what it works at, why the... decisions 1 min Kemadruma, the loneliness yoga, Kemadruma is the combination in which the moon has no planet beside it, and the sixth-century verse that names it also says, in the same sentence... myth-vs-method 2 min The five limbs of a day, The Indian almanac measures a single day five different ways at once, and this is what each of the five counters is actually counting. almanac 2 min Why your moon sign changes between apps, Two astrology apps can hand you two different moon signs, not because they disagree about where the moon is, but because they disagree about where to... computed-sky 2 min Why we are building bhagol, The founder of an Indian astrology company explains why he is building it around rules the software cannot quietly break, starting with a refusal to... founder-notes