An encyclopedia that happens to include astrology, the gist

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 reading a person's birth chart do not arrive until number 101 of about 106.

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

One chapter says that clouds get pregnant and give birth to rain 195 days later. Two chapters on, the same author tells you to catch that rain in a bowl with a mouth exactly one cubit across and write down how much you collected.

About fifteen hundred years ago an Indian astronomer called Varahamihira wrote a very large book, the Brihat Samhita. He is remembered as an astrologer, so you would expect a book about horoscopes. Open it and you find something else.

There are chapters on finding underground water by reading which trees and anthills stand where. On picking a site for a house, testing the soil, and which timber must not be used. On rain, comets, earthquakes, fruit trees, grain prices, perfume, temple images, and how to judge a cow, a dog, a cock, a tortoise, a goat, a horse or an elephant. On testing gems, including how to tell a good diamond and how to name its flaws.

The chapters about a person's birth sit at the back, four of them out of about 106. That is deliberate. In his first chapter Varahamihira says this branch of learning has three parts and that this book is only one of them. Birth charts he had already handled in a different book.

Some of what is here is careful work that can be checked. The water chapter says: walk to that plant, go three cubits north, dig, and expect water at about this depth. The ground can prove you wrong by evening. The rain chapter gives a standard bowl and a named unit, so one year's total can be set beside another's. Other parts cannot be checked at all, like clouds conceiving, or the passage matching soil colours and smells to the four castes.

What the whole book shows is what the job actually was. A king in the 500s had no weather office, no water engineer, no building inspector and nobody to value a gem. He had one educated man expected to say in advance whatever could be said in advance, so everything that needed judging beforehand arrived at that man's desk. The sky was how he filed the work, not the whole of it.

Words decoded

Varahamihira: an Indian astronomer and astrologer at work in the 500s CE, and the one classical author of this kind whose century can be pinned down
Brihat Samhita (बृहत्संहिता): his largest book; the title means roughly "the great collection"
samhita: a collection, and also the name of the branch of the subject dealing with the world at large, such as weather, crops, omens and kings, rather than with one person
horoscopy: the part of astrology that reads the sky at the moment one person was born
birth chart: a map of where the sun, moon and planets stood when somebody was born
cubit: an old measure, roughly the length of a forearm
station: one of the 27 named patches of sky, each about one night's travel for the moon
drona and adhaka: old Indian units of volume, used here to record how much rain fell
Bhattotpala: a Kashmiri scholar of the tenth century who explained Varahamihira's books line by line
chapter numbers: not fixed; printed editions count them differently, so the same chapter can be 52 in one book and 53 in another

Why anyone should careWe assume old astrology was mainly about individual fortunes, and this book says otherwise: reading the sky was one department inside a much larger job of practical advice, with the personal horoscope a short section at the end. That changes what you should expect when somebody hands you a classical text and tells you it is all about you.

Read it properly, 8 min An encyclopedia that happens to include astrology