Everything you always wanted to know about Astrological Research but didn't know who to ask...
Featuring: Renay Oshop, Will Morris, Alex Trenoweth, Linda Berry David CochraneFreddy Kollerstrom Glenn Perry Free for Registrants of #TheKeplerConference 1st Class Always Free for Newcomers http://tinyurl.com/zo4e9s4
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Sanskrit numerals form the magic square associated with the holy planet Jupiter and the holy number three. There are yantras for the Sun, Moon, and Venus as well. All other grahas ("planets" in Jyotish or Vedic astrology) are also available by request. These are available in many varieties of silver and gold, including very inexpensive plated versions. For more information, see the book Numerology by Harish Johari. Here, here, and here are some more sites worth reading. In a previous post, I described how non-dictionary word use in Amazon reviews peak in a periodic way in Mercury retrograde. I redid the analysis but also took out the common words "dvds", "DVDs", "apps", and "Apps" from consideration. (They would have been counted as misspellings before which I did not first realize.) I also applied the mean filter to a wider time frame, so that it would be more accurate in the window of July 1, 2009 to Jul 1, 2013: That was enough to reduce the peak at 9. (Perhaps, there was some kind of DVD and/or app release cycle that the 9 band referred to.) The result is that the fundamental in the transform is now at 13. That gives us the following for the fundamental wave: The peaks of this wave align very well with Mercury retrograde (demarcated by the gray bands), representing a regular increase of 613.789 percent from the average difference of blue actual value from gold general trend in the top picture during those times
1. Introduction “Mercury retrograde” is, in my culture, a time of great concern. It is believed by many that the apparent astronomical retrogression affects human communication, travel, use of electronics, and thinking, among other broadly related things. To test the general thesis of an effect on communications during Mercury retrograde, I looked at a randomized 5% of a collection of 69,242,585 Amazon reviews posted between Jan 1, 2009 and July 23, 2014. (Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more n.d.) I counted the number of words per entry that are not in a computerized dictionary, while discounting digits, internet links, emoji, words with three or fewer characters. Non-English entries were also discarded. As well, not considered were context mistakes (such as there/their/they’re), grammar, punctuation, or capitalization errors. I wanted to simply approach comparing occurrences of larger non-dictionary words in Mercury retrograde seasons versus non-Mercury retrograde seasons. 2. Materials The source of the millions of Amazon reviews is a big data repository held by Stanford University. (Jure Leskovec and Andrej Krevl 2014) The Amazon data in particular is managed by Julian McAuley who kindly made it available to me for research purposes. (J. McAuley 2015) I chose an “aggressively deduplicated” version of the dataset that has no duplicated entries whatsoever. This data represents all 82.84 million Amazon product reviews with metadata to the date of July 23, 2014. 3. Methods The software Mathematica was used to implement standard data science and signal processing techniques. (Wolfram Research, Inc. 2015) The algorithms are publicly available. (Oshop, Zenodo 2015) First, the data was scrubbed of 16.04% of its 82,469,759 entries, as these proved to be nonstandard JSON (the main format of the database) and could not be evaluated by Mathematica itself. Since automating analysis of such a large dataset would be a primary key to any success, I was comfortable with the percentage lost. However, whether there is some important unifying theme to the lost entries, such as Amazon product department, time of submission, etc. is not known by me. Using such large datasets (here, 57 GB uncompressed) is still something of an art form, especially for an older dataset, even by the best operators of the best technologies. Thus, a table of 69,242,585 lines was built with two entries per line: the time of the original entry in Unix format and the review text, including edits. No record exists in this database of the timing of the edits to the review. Next, I programmed an evaluation that used a random number generator and the built-in dictionary to analyze a randomized choice of 5% of all entries. (DictionaryLookup Source Information—Wolfram Language Documentation n.d.) Each entry’s review was split into textual word substrings. To find emojis and links, the word strings had to be analyzed character by character. After that, if the dictionary found no match to the word string, it was counted as a “misspelling” in that entry. A sum of these entry misspellings was divided by the number of total textual words in the entry and the result was recorded along with the day of the original submission. Even with a randomized sampling of only 5%, running this program took about 31 hours on my desktop computer, at a rate of analysis on the order of 1,000 entries per second. Note that this technique would consider an unusual brand name of a product, for example, as a misspelling which would be introduced as a kind of noise to any more general trend. The resulting entries were grouped by date. A day’s group mean was recorded with that date and retained. These values for all dates in between January 1, 2009 and July 23, 2014, GMT, were built into a time series. A mean filter was applied to the time series, and the results were plotted along with it. The difference between the actual mean value for the day and the trend from the filter was found though subtraction and plotted. A variety of periodicities emerged. That variety was analyzed through a discrete Fourier transform. The main structure, coming from the contribution of the highest two values, was graphed and found to correspond well to the regular periodicity of Mercury retrograde. In the following pictures, the thin vertical bands mark the actual demarcations of Mercury retrograde, GMT, in that time frame. 4. Results A. Movement of Daily Averages The blue line describes the up and down movement of actual daily averages. The lighter gold line depicts the general trend. This general trend was obtained by a mean filter on the blue data. Because of the nature of a mean filter, the right and left end regions are not as accurate, which you can see in the above graph. They were excised from consideration. Accordingly, the following analyses include only date values between July 1, 2009 and July 1, 2013, still a rather long time length of four years. B. Differences of the Daily Averages from the General Trend The trend filter value (gold in Figure 1) was subtracted from mean filter value for each day (blue) and the result was plotted. These differences between actual daily value and the general trend were subjected to discrete Fourier transformation. The spectrograph is below. 1. Plot of Discrete Fourier Transform of Differences The fundamental first line is the highest at 9 along the horizontal axis, and the second major peak is at 13. With these numbers, along with their heights, we can construct the major course of the data, i.e., the wave that contributes the very most to the rise and fall of daily misspelling rates in Amazon reviews. 2. Construction of the Sum of Fundamental and First Major Harmonic As you can see, before each non-Mercury retrograde time marks the local and global minima of non-dictionary word use rate with a rise to the local and global maxima all occurring in Mercury retrograde. [Edit: If you like even cleaner data and would like to see an even more perfect graph, see this more recent post, where I improve the evaluation algorithm slightly but reasonably which was enough to change the fundamental to exactly Mercury retrograde.] 5. Discussion Looking much like software’s graph of an audio clip of the human voice, Figure 2 might at first seem fascinating but opaque to easy interpretation. In the case of the audio’s graph, the sound it represents is all in there, but how do you get from the visual picture back to the sound again? After all, recording, compressing, transmitting, and recreation of audio all happen from such software. There has to be a mathematical way, and there is. One of the major tools of science of the last one hundred years is the Fourier transform. Think of someone playing a pure middle C note on a perfect piano. The Fourier transform would break down that note to a graph much like Figure 3, only there would just be a single line on the left (with its mirror on the right), also called the fundamental: the one matching the frequency of middle C. In Nature, things tend to be more complicated. An actual piano would likely have rough, very minor sub-harmonics that build on and modify the major one. The major one would still have the exact shape of the sinusoidal wave of perfect middle C, but these rough minor frequencies would adjust that first dominant curve into a final wave form that is more complicated than, but resembling, a pure C note. This set of more minor notes would also appear on the Fourier transform plot, but as shorter lines and at placements along the horizontal axis that correspond to each of their frequencies. The heights give their order of modification of the first, fundamental note. Typically, the whole wave can be summarized in just a few lines. That is how compression and removal of noise in sound happens. Returning to the sound of the human voice, the complex stacking of a rich variety of sub-harmonics could still be teased apart by the wonder of the Fourier transform, but into dozens of lines. Similarly, looking at the wave form of Figure 3, there are dominant “notes” that can be pulled out, and the most fundamental, dominant one of all, the one that all others modify, is at a frequency band of occurring approximately once every 142 to 162 days, with a phase shift for the time window of -2.90338. This is the highest band at position 9. The major, first harmonic appears next in height (and strength of effect) at the 13 position which represents a frequency band of occurring approximately once every 111 to 115 days, with a phase shift for the time window of 1.05873, the very frequency and phase shift of Mercury retrograde itself in the time period being considered. Adding the fundamental and first harmonic together, we obtain a wave, and as seen in its graph in Figure 4, the lowest troughs of the wave all happen in between the periods of time also known as Mercury retrograde with the highest peaks all in Mercury Retrograde. 6. Conclusions The results of this study are still a ways away from proving that Mercury retrograde causes spelling errors, although, with this study, an important first step has been established. Herein is just proof that the period also known as Mercury retrograde is a uniform time of maximum periodic contribution to non-dictionary word use in the dataset, an increase that can be as high as 2.19%. If this small, but significant, error rate boost in a single act would hold across a series of them, then compounded across the thousands of small things that we do each each day, it would make one virtually sure to make a big mistake (one that is built from the small steps) during the 21 - 23 days of a Mercury retrograde period. A remarkable side note is that the two percent, statistically significant increase was the same found during Mercury retrograde for a completely unrelated database’s non-dictionary use rate during a completely different period. (Oshop, Across Millions of Entries, Reddit is More Likely to Show Misspellings During Mercury Retrograde in May 2015, 2015) There may still be some unknown market or cultural factor that has exactly the same periodicity and starting point as Mercury retrograde. If so, that would still suggest a tendency, actually an absolute correlation, to increased use of non-dictionary words during Mercury retrograde seasons. People who believe in some increased danger of error during that time would still be right. The poetic turn of phrase of the harmonics of the spheres may be no mere metaphor. Works Cited Amazon.com: Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs & more. n.d. http://www.amazon.com (accessed 10 24, 2015). "DictionaryLookup Source Information—Wolfram Language Documentation." Wolfram Language & System Documentation Center. n.d. http://reference.wolfram.com/language/note/DictionaryLookupSourceInformation.html(accessed 10 24, 2015). Discrete Fourier Transforms—Wolfram Language Documentation. n.d. http://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/FourierTransforms.html (accessed 10 25, 2015). J. McAuley, R. Pandey, J. Leskovec. "Inferring networks of substitutable and complementary products." Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2015. Jure Leskovec and Andrej Krevl. {SNAP Datasets}: {Stanford} Large Network Dataset Collection. June 2014. http://snap.stanford.edu/data (accessed 10 24, 2015). Oshop, Renay: - Across Millions of Entries, Reddit is More Likely to Show Misspellings During Mercury Retrograde in May 2015. 10 10, 2015. http://www.ayurastro.com/articles/across-millions-of-entries-reddit-is-more-likely-to-show-misspellings-during-mercury-retrograde-in-may-2015 (accessed 11 2, 2015). — (2015). Non-Dictionary Words Occur More Often in Amazon Reviews During Mercury Retrograde. Zenodo. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.32847 Wolfram Research, Inc. Mathematica. Version 10.2. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Research, Inc., 2015. In a previous post, I showed that Reddit entries were slightly, but significantly, more likely to contain spelling errors and other unusual word choices. I had not discounted the most common slang and swear words, which one could say contain proper meaning and are not misspelled even while not in the dictionary. In this post, I will account for them. Dropping common slang and swear words ("ok", "lol", "bs", "gg", "awol", "4Chan", "nsfl", "nsfw", "ama", "s%#&t*", "f&%k*", etc. and ":)", ":(", ";)", ";(", ":/", ":\", etc., and their main capitalization variants) as well as links, the difference between Mercury Retrograde (MR) and Non Mercury Retrograde (NMR) in incidence of word spelling errors divided by entry word length increased to 2.14%. Moreover, this difference of 2.14% is quite statistically significant with an ANOVA p-value for equality at 6.4x10^-14. The 95% mean confidence interval for NMR is ~{0.0528, 0.0531} and for MR it is ~{0.540 , 0.542}. Here is the histogram showing the separation of MR (yellow) from NMR (blue) as well as the quartile-quartile plot comparing MR to NMR upon removing slang, emojis, links, and non-English entries. Again, the difference could still be accounted for by other strange words, like unusual last names, that suddenly became fashionable in the MR period, but keep in mind that these results are from scanning evenly across 53 million entries. That is something like two thousand front page posts with full comments per day in both NMR and MR. This huge number is likely to dilute away any such fashionable blip with a similarly fashionable blip in NMR, although more data is always better. (Looking at all or at least more MRs and NMRs would be nice, but this is all the data I have right now.) [Edited: If you would like to see such a study across many Mercury retrograde seasons, see here.] To give you a sense of perspective, the average number of words in an entry only increased by 0.4% during MR despite wide variation, and that increase is not statistically significant. So, again I say, a >2% increase is huge, a statistically and culturally significant result. Consider this: if you are just 2 percent more likely to make a mistake in some small thing during Mercury Retrograde, but you build up on hundreds (if not thousands) of those small things per day, that effectively implies that your rate of making some bigger mistake skyrockets. For example, if you do 10 related small things in a MR day and each step is two percent more likely to cause an error than in NMR, then you are at least 21 percent more likely to commit a compounded error that day, and within the three weeks of MR, you are almost sure to make at least four such serious errors. The Mathematica notebook is available for download.
Postscript: Re-running the file but also dropping "OMG" and "(͡ ͜ºʖ ͡º)" increased the difference between NMR and MR misspelling rates further to 2.83 percent. Mean 95% confidence intervals are {0.061656, 0.0619098} and {0.0632795, 0.0635948}. “Mercury retrograde” is, in my culture, a time of great concern. It is believed by many that the apparent astronomical retrogression affects human communication, use of electronics, and thinking, among other things. Before May 19, 2015, 2:46 am GMT, the people of Earth were not experiencing apparent Mercury retrograde that month, (I call this time NMR), and after that, they were (MR). To test the general thesis of an effect on communications during Mercury retrograde, I looked at a randomized 3.13836% of the Reddit comments in May 2015, wherein 31,863,786 submissions (approx. 1.8 million per day) occurred during NMR and 22,640,624 (approx. 2.1 million per day) occurred during MR. I used the software Mathematica to scan for spelling mistakes, finally comparing the distributions, averages, variances, and their ratios of spelling mistake rates (number of naïve word spelling mistakes in an entry divided by number of words in that entry) during NMR and MR. I did not edit out common words that are not in the dictionary (e.g., many last names, slang, and swear words) or emojis such as :), and so they artificially increased the spelling error rate. The hope here is that this increase is minimal and approximately uniform across the millions of entries in NMR and MR, but such uniformity is, I believe, a little unlikely and not known by me, regardless. The uniformity level could be easily tested, however. What were not included for consideration:
The numbers of entries thus finally considered were 951,084 during NMR and 674,001 during MR. Note that the distributions by histogram are very similar, and the probability plot is visually close to 1:1 (yellow overlapping blue) relative to a normal distribution (the dotted line). Since the distributions are so similar, we can compare the means and variances directly. The NMR mean is 0.0869656, the MR mean is 0.0881096. The ratio of MR mean to NMR mean is 1.01316. The ratio of MR variance to NMR variance is 1.01399. Thus, prima facie, average word spelling mistake rates in Reddit submissions in May of 2015 slightly increased by about 1.3 percent during Mercury retrograde and variance of these increased by about 1.4 percent. MR Mean & Variance 95% Confidence Intervals: {0.0878318, 0.0883875} & {0.0135012, 0.0135927} NMR Mean & Variance 95% Confidence Intervals: {0.0867333, 0.0871978} & {0.0133221, 0.0133981} Significantly, the confidence intervals do not overlap. In fact, the Kruskal-Wallis p-value for equivalence of medians, where there was a 2.9% increase, is about 2x10^-11 and the Conover p-value for equivalence of variances is about 1x10^-3946 (ha). Therefore, I believe these slight but significant results do warrant further investigation into Mercury retrograde timed effects on word choices in this May 2015 database in particular, and that the data does somewhat support the thesis of a pervasive effect on communication in humans, at least during this particular Mercury retrograde. A more far ranging horizontal study across more Mercury retrogrades would be welcome though, especially since some are described as worse than others, and so the effects based on entry topics specific to the windows can be smoothed out. I would submit to telecommunications companies an easy and perhaps more fruitful challenge: during MR periods, do they experience an increase in technical support call volume, length, and difficulty? Here, also, is the Mathematica notebook for your review.
A student just asked a great question: "If an astrologer sees something about the past, but that didn't materialize, does it give a clue about the kind of karma that the native built up? Meaning, can retrodiction [a prediction about the past] be used to live more intelligently in the future?" Here is my answer: If the retrodiction failed, then the astrologer failed. Sorry if that seems harsh, but that is my first answer. Building on it, that simply means that the astrologer is still learning, and very few astrologers are not still learning. What it can do is teach you something new, or at least stimulate you to learn more, some new technique, some new meaning. So, at the very least, it can cause the astrologer to live more intelligently into the future. The client is just fine, always has been and always will be (and so is the astrologer). Now, I feel like latently embedded in that answer is another question about free will. That is, some may say that the person is "just" exercising free will, and that is not in the chart. The concept of free will is held in such high esteem in American culture, and so, if your astrology can not line up with a past event, it is not helpful or even honorable, the thinking might go. I would like to address that thinking. Remember that astrology is fundamentally about maya, and in maya is great cause and effect, such a dense web of it in fact that almost everything is fixed in potential in the chart. This is the field of experience, and the astrologer excels here. There is in fact only one thing not in the chart: Purusha consciousness, "one-pointed awareness", also the only thing which gives us real freedom and hence real free will. It is true; that is beyond the chart, always has been and always will be. (In one-pointedness is no movement, no change, nothing to move into or change into, so the melodramas of the stars are of no use.) Hence, It is beyond the laws of karma and is the pure essence of everything, including Itself. This is the seed of awareness, and personal consciousness excels here. This is reality. However, what does Purusha consciousness want to fulfill? Prakriti (Mahamaya), just as Shiva wants to fulfill Parvati, leading us in a delightful mobius strip back to the astrology chart. This is why Dr. Lad draws an infinity symbol between Purusha and Prakriti at the top of the Sankhya tree.
To know this diagram is to know astrology, to know Ayurveda, to know both the manifest world and where it came, to know the child of Purusha and Prakriti. Ganesha. Note: above Purusha and Prakriti is the unary oneness of Atman. Atman is not shown in this particular version, but in school, when presenting this topic, Dr. Lad does certainly draw It. Aum Shreem Hreem Kleem Glaum Gam Ganapataye Swaha! Considering all of the talk about money, budgets, and taxes in this political season here in the USA, I thought that I would explore a bit about a topic of great fascination to many, money. The following is material generated from discussion with my dear students. I could not have thought of these thoughts without them. Let's look at the connections. Mercury rules money in the chart and business people, and indeed the fleet-footed god Mercury used to be on American dimes until fairly recently. Why? Well, Mercury goes back and forth like money, business, and communication, but I think we can learn even more. Why would the wings be connected to the head on the coin (versus the back, the legs, etc.)? Hint: an angel has wings connected to the mid-back. What body parts and hence what planets are thereby connected? Answer: an angel is one whose Mercury (thoughts/wings/business) and Venus (love/heart/back) are connected thusly. The USA did not want to portray itself as an angel. So what would the image on the coin represent? The head represents the Sun and also government and power and self-initiative. Empirically, people with strong Sun in their chart are typically very good with these themes. The Mercury coin is referring to some sort of American ideal, a self made man. It unifies business/money (Mercury/wings) with self-employment/government (Sun/head). It is very interesting that the coin was removed (1945) around the time the World Bank kicked in (1944 in theory, 1945 in practice). If such a development is the true cause, then the World Bank has mythologically done a very serious deed; it severed the succession from king (Sun) to prince (Mercury), and hence stopped the very life blood of our country. Our money (Mercury/prince) cannot grow, mature and rise to full power (Sun/king). By the way, why does it only feel right for wings (Mercury) to be either near the heart (Venus, for the angel) or head (Sun, for the self-made man/government) or ankles (Saturn, for the messenger)? (Think how silly wings coming out of the knees or an abdomen would be!) It may be because Sun, Mercury, and Venus are always together in the chart. Look at any chart and they will be within a sign of each other (because from a geocentric point of view that is the chart, the inner planets will be toward the Sun). The servant messenger has wings at his feet simply because Saturn, the servant, considers Mercury a friend: the internet (Mercury) is most a boon to the impoverished (Saturn). (Bike messengers often come from poorer society and are fine contemporary representations of this combination of archetypes.) However, the internet is neutral to the impoverished as Mercury is neutral to Saturn in the Jyotish friendship table. We say "Don't shoot the messenger!" for a reason. Missiles are an act of the Sun. The communications (Mercury) is neutral to the messenger (Saturn), but the receiver (Sun) of the message considers the messenger (Saturn) an enemy and can even cause astrological "combustion" of Mercury when the latter comes too close to It. Moreover, the messenger may have been killed off because of the lack of mutual friendship between Saturn and Mercury so that Mercury could not protect Saturn from Saturn's mutual enmity with the Sun. By the way, it is no surprise then that these quicksilver shoes were/are popular with the everyday, "pedestrian" people who are also represented by Saturn. That the shoes are expensive despite their appeal to the more poor makes sense because a 13 yr old loves expensive things probably the most in his/her life; even a mid-life crisis person spends his/her money being/acting like a teenager. Remember, both money and teenagerhood are represented by Mercury. So, the Sun-Mercury connection may have been killed off by the World Bank, because of the lack of mutual friendship between Sun and Mercury. That is, government would never allow a truly laissez faire libertarianism to rise. It (the Sun) is too invested in Its friendships to Mars and Jupiter, that is, to Its notions of war/anger/blood and peace/religion/spiritualism. All or any of those themes are just not profitable to a government, and any real government that places money first would not have them. Mars and Jupiter consider Mercury to be an enemy, while Mercury is neutral to them. All that are left are the angels, Mercury in strong mutual friendship with Venus. The angels alone survive. If you are interested in more of this conflation of myth, archetype, and astrology, consider the movie "Wings of Desire": "The angel got sick of watching over people (the original title is 'The sky over Berlin...'), fell in love with a circus performer, then he decides to get rid of his wings and comes down to earth as human... having no money (he bought clothes from second hand store). But he was way happier and could be with the girl he fell in love with." Just a few observations on this great movie:
1) His dropping of wings is the dropping of thoughts (Mercury) which is perhaps true spirituality (since Mercury is debilitated in Pisces). Yet, he retains the full power of the heart (because Venus is exalted in Pisces). 2) It is coherent that he has no money when he drops Mercury, since money is represented by Mercury, as described above. The angel (Venus) IS strong mutual friends with the messenger, and so, the everyday people do easily understand communications about love, even if in bits and pieces through a mercurial intermediary such as that movie or, with hope, perhaps this post. Never mind about changing the government. Instead, love and thereby, through a witting intermediary of communication, change the manas heart/mind/public opinion as represented by the Moon. She can then, through mutual friendship with the Sun/government, impress It and change It. If we are talking about the people (Saturn) - and hence their only powers of love (Venus) and communication, the internet, or even money (Mercury) - this is the only way to truly change the Sun. The trick here is that Mercury hates the Moon, just as a 13 year old boy hates his mom. Mercury will not directly, intentionally affect the Moon. Mercury, however, wants very much to impress his dad, the Sun (government), as lobbyists know. The solution? Be in love first (Venus) to improve communication generally (Mercury), and the mind (Moon) will certainly notice and give support to the improvement, just as a mom wishes the best for her son. The government will change accordingly. In translation, no amount of brainpower or rationale will change the nature of the government, but public opinion (Moon) sure will and quickly, and that changes only by the mano a mano power of love. So, thanks for taking this little journey with me. I hope you are seeing the power of the integration of archetypes in our real world and the importance of understanding them via astrology. I'm going to wrote tonight about something that I have been following all day: the story of the skinny little 14 yr old boy who was arrested yesterday. I have found it fascinating, and I am seemingly not alone- almost a million people tweeted about it in the last 24 hours. By the afternoon, Obama, Zuckerberg, many astronauts, and other famous scientists extended invitations of amazing, touching, and substantial support directly to the kid. This story fascinates me because it is something of a perfect, beautiful thing: tech and science education enthusiasts unified with anti-Patriot Act people and anti-racists, and it turns out to be a tasty recipe: they are legion (and include me). First, the chart of the arrest, approximately 3 pm, yesterday in Irving, TX: Some salient points: 1) the Arudha lagna (the appearance) of the event is in Aries, owned by a weak Mars by gandanta (0 degrees) but strong by shadbala (the strongest graha there at 198) and in a Ketu-ruled nakshatra. The Mars is in the fifth house to this Aries. This all supports the appearance of things as being an act of a kid "terrorist". By the way, that Mars representing the police is enlivening by aspect the Saturn placement, the upset, of the "little people" in Scorpio. 2) That Arudha lagna is exactly at the same placement (degree) as the arudha (appearance) of the third house, the a3. So, the school house (the third house) appears to be the same/the locale of the kid-terrorist act. 3) That Pluto in Saggitarius is rising is no surprise: the school wanted to take control of the situation. 4) Virgo, which as we will see, does here and will continue to represent the innocent kid's internal environment well, is conflicted/confused with a strong exalted Mercury in Hasta, the nakshatra of the hands, but with Rahu in a nakshatra of Uttara Phalguni representing "patronage, favors, and kindness". (See Light on Life.) This is what the child was yearning for (Rahu), as he admitted to reporters the next day. (He was new to the school and wanted to impress his teachers, find his niche, and get support for his prodigious abilities, i.e. exalted Mercury). He used his hands (Hasta) to make a fancy little thing (Chitra): something on his Mind (Moon). Hasta is Moon-based. The Moon was in the nakshatra of Chitra in a Mars pada, suggesting the fine little thing with an engineering basis (Mars) was the foundation of point 1). 5) Note also Uranus retrograde in Revati, the nakshatra of time pieces. The firecracker/revolutionary quality of Uranus was being expressed through a timepiece. 6) Now, quite detracting from that Virgo environment is the complex of super powerful planets in the 12th house to it: namely, the Sun, Jupiter, Mars stellium in Leo in the chart's ninth house. Jupiter, representing I believe the principal/teachers in this case, was in control of the situation, aspecting into and owning the first house, or so they thought. Note the Purva Phalguni placement, one that "represents a lack of forethought or planning". The fast and strong involvement of various governmental agencies must have happened, both from reports and by observation of that incredibly strong Sun there in Leo. 7) Note the Ascendant exactly at 7 degrees and 6 seconds, the same degree as the Arudha lagna and a3 of point 2) above. This puts the "kid-terrorist" in the "schoolhouse" trope front and center in the story of the moment. 8) Also of note, finally, is Venus in Cancer in Mercury-ruled Ashlesha. A female Engineering teacher to whom the kid showed the clock was "dead in the water" and no help or in hiding in the situation, but I suspect she will actually be an end to the principal-DHS-police juggernaut of the 9th house that was in power at that moment. So what happened next? Let's look at the chart of today, quite a full day in the story. Three distinct periods marked today: approximately 11am MT when Obama and Zuckerberg extended their succor, approximately 12:50 MT when the school district and police released a somewhat pathetic response, and approximately 3:40 pm MT when a triumphant 14 year old's press conference was aired on all major news outlets. So, the above is the chart for Obama's announcement of support. The upapada lagna (that which supports or upholds) is is on Obama's actual lagna of Capricorn upholding the arudha lagna in Satabhishak (which represents by myth and identity all of the scientists) . Obama is successfully supporting all of the publicly upset scientists. (That is to say, Saturn, the lord of Obama's ascendant and the Aquarius of the scientists, is rising.) In this snapshot above of the school's release of their explanation, the lazy principal and administrators (still Jupiter in Purva Phalguni) think they are in control, by claiming support of, actually linking their statement to, the ineffectual police (Mars is still week at 0 degrees). The governmental agencies (DHS) which were in control the day before are now so close to 30 degrees in SU/RA/RA/MA nakshatra as to be weak enough to be almost completely taken over by the scientists' (RA) opinions. Everyone has forgotten about what was on Ahmed's mind (Moon) from the day before: the perfect little thing that he made to impress his teacher (Venus in an environment of the Moon), the clock. That is well-hidden and out of view of the story in the twelfth house. Any consideration of it is as an academic expression. Moon is now in Swati, the nakshatra of the academic. The beautiful graha malika yoga, involving houses 9 through 12, gives Mercury (Ahmed) as the one in the focus of the kendra of fame in the 10th house. An advanced technique tells us that the fifth house to it is what starts that fame, namely Capricorn, that is, Obama. What will end the bout, the so-called 20 minutes, of fame? The same advanced technique tells us it is the 11th house to Mercury, i.e., the Venus placement, which represents that teacher. We will be hearing more from the teacher. Her internal life, ruled by the fast moving Moon, is probably quite topsy-turvy right now. It will especially be so for about another 5 days until the Moon is done being debilitated in Scorpio. She will side with the administrators then for a few days but probably will then flip her position. In this great image above of Ahmed's press conference, we see the powerful governmental-police-administrator stellarium in the 8th house, dead. The Virgoan Ahmed is the teacher, doing the right thing, and being lucky (9th house), and public opinion is the name of the game, with Moon (public opinion) in the tenth house.
That beautiful parivartana between Moon and the seventh house Venus suggests that the "Other" for Ahmed (7th house) is very much doting on him, indeed. That yoga simply did not exist the day before. Retrospection is all well and good, but what do I see for the future in this fast moving narrative? Well, principally, Sun is leaving its home and entering Virgo, so there should be even more amplification of Ahmed's power (and ego). The "everyday people" of Saturn will remain upset and confused in Scorpio but will ultimately grudgingly give Obama props for his stance. (Saturn aspects into Capricorn, Obama's ascendant.) Immediately, in the next few days, the female engineering teacher will speak out as the Moon rises through Libra and may choose to leave the school district over the weekend. The school district will march on, or rather limp, in its position, without Sun to support them/it. Perhaps in about six weeks, with Sun debilitated in Libra, we will see the lawsuits come - not against the school district, but against the governmental agencies whose policies are ultimately responsible. Here is something you might not have seen before in your Jyotish studies: a visual depiction of the qualities (gunas) of the nakshatras. The material is all taken from Hart de Fouw's excellent work: Light on Life, An Introduction to the Astrology of India (particularly pages 206-214). As one bright student told me the other day, the nakshatras are kind of like the periodic table of Jyotish. Full of story and lore, truth and the telling, myth and math, nakshatras neatly introduce us to the more Tantric webs of meaning of Nature and of the Universe. They are parts of the 360 degree zodiac, each of the 27 nakshatras being 13 degrees and 20 seconds. The 28th that is sometimes used is abhijit, but "only occasionally, in electional astrology" and its depiction would "ruin the symmetrical distribution" as well as mess up the divine geometry inherent within. (See Light on Life.) Numbers are a quick and easy way to label the other standard nakshatras:
Abhijit is acknowledged in the diagram as the empty "28"th pie slice even though its placement is typically between Uttara Ashada (21) and Shravana (22). It is my belief and motivation that, by looking at these visual diagrams, new insights will come to the student, particularly for those, like me, who are pitta and visually oriented. Here are the diagrams. There is room in the lower right for your own notes. As always, contact me with any questions, comments, or observations, and I will include them here. Coming soon: some sort of visual treatment for the 4 padas per nakshatra, raising the number of elements to the holy number of 108.
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ARTICLESAuthorRenay Oshop - teacher, searcher, researcher, immerser, rejoicer, enjoying the interstices between Twitter, Facebook, and journals. Categories
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September 2023
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