SHIVOHAMPATH

Most of what is called Vedic astrology today uses a small part of what Parashara actually wrote. The Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra divides every sign sixteen ways and names a presiding deity for almost every division. It gives a method to calculate the moment of conception from a birth chart. And it weights one division, which most astrologers never open, above the birth chart itself. These past months I have been teaching Foundations of Jyotish to my first cohort, checking e

From extraordinary human abilities to mysterious beings and unseen realms, ancient Indian scriptures describe a universe far stranger than anything Hollywood has imagined. But why is so much of this knowledge considered inaccessible, and what does it actually take to attain a siddhi? Imagine walking through a dense forest in the middle of the night. There is no moonlight, no torch, and no clear path ahead. Somewhere beneath the leaves, a snake is moving. Poisonous insects cra

There are people who discover spirituality. And then there are people for whom it feels strangely more like remembering. They may grow up in families where nobody practices what they eventually become drawn toward. They may encounter a deity for the first time and feel an intimacy that seems completely disproportionate to the length of that acquaintance. A mantra may feel familiar before its meaning is properly understood. A temple may produce homesickness rather than novelty

I know the argument already. Shiva is not a body. He is not somewhere outside me. He is not limited to one form. If everything is Shiva, then why do I still desire Him in one particular form? Why do I long for one face, one voice, one body, one presence? I understand the philosophy. I speak about Kashmir Shaivism and Trika all the time. I know that Shiva is consciousness itself, that nothing is really outside Him, that the whole universe is His own expression. And yet, my dee

Travel between realms and the passing of twenty seven mahāyugas A father takes his daughter to ask Brahmā whom she should marry. They wait for a musical performance to finish. By the time he receives an answer, the men he had considered have disappeared from the world. Their descendants have gone too. During what feels like a brief visit, twenty-seven mahāyugas have passed on Earth. This is the extraordinary situation at the centre of the Balarāma–Revatī story. Cosmology dete

Few Sanskrit words have been flattened by modern conversations about Tantra as thoroughly as yoni. For some, the word immediately becomes sexual. Tantra mentions the yoni, therefore Tantra must be a tradition of sacred sexuality, erotic techniques, or sexual liberation. The opposite reaction is almost equally misleading. Faced with that sexualization, people sometimes rush to sanitize the word completely: yoni is “only symbolic,” it merely represents “the divine feminine,” an

Why Bridal Devotion is One of the Oldest Languages of Intimacy with the Divine, and Why It Still Makes Modern People Uncomfortable There is a peculiar contradiction in the way we speak about devotion today. We are comfortable saying that God is our father. We understand calling the Divine our mother. We accept the language of master and servant. Friendship with God sounds beautiful. Seeing the deity as one’s child is considered tender and devotional. But the moment someone sa

When astrologers today speak about past-life karma, the conversation tends to move almost automatically toward Ketu, the 5th house, the 12th house, or the Shashtiamsha, the D60. D60 in particular has acquired an almost unquestioned reputation as the chart of previous-life karma. But hidden inside the Drekkāṇa chapter of Secret of Vargas is a considerably more specific technique. It does not begin with Ketu. It does not begin with D60. It begins with the 9th house. And after j

On the advanced course and why I could not teach it until now There is a particular kind of woman I keep meeting. She has done the work. She has wept at the altar. She has written the letters to Him and burned them, she has kept the vow, she has sat in the dark with her longing until the longing itself became a kind of company. Somewhere along the way, something opened. A night, a temple, a moment on a road and for a breath, or an hour, or three days, there was no distance at

The Saptavimshamsha is the thirteenth of the sixteen vargas and one of the least worked. It has three names in the text, Bhamsha, Nakshatramsha and Saptavimshamsha, and the middle one tells you what it is about. I want to lay out exactly what the sources give, because the honest answer is that Parashara gives very little and most of what circulates about the D-27 is later expansion. That is not a reason to discard the chart. It is a reason to know which part of what you are s

There is a reason the Jyotishi's city and the Lord of Time's city are the same city. Most people who go to Ujjain go for Mahakaleshwar, and rightly. But the thing I keep returning to is that this is not a coincidence of geography. Ujjain is where Indian astronomy set its zero. It is where the meridian was drawn, where the calendar was reckoned from, where Varahamihira and Brahmagupta worked. And the deity who sits at that zero point is named Mahakala, Great Time. The city tha

Every sign of the zodiac is thirty degrees wide. Divide that into sixty parts and each part is half a degree. Parashara gives every one of those sixty half-degrees a name. Not a number. A name. Ghora, the violent one. Kubera, the celestial treasurer. Garala, venom. Amrita, nectar. Mrityu. Purna Chandra, the full moon. Kalapavaka, the fire that burns at the end of the world. Indu Rekha, a single streak of moonlight. Your Moon does not simply sit in Taurus. It sits in a specifi

There is a Sanskrit word every married woman in India has used a thousand times without noticing what it is doing. Pati. Husband. And also: Lord, master, protector, the one to whom something belongs. Ganapati, lord of the ganas. Pashupati, lord of creatures. Umapati, husband of Uma. The language never made two separate words for the man you marry and the God you worship, and I used to think that was an accident of vocabulary. Then I found the place in the classical literature

There is a question I am asked quietly, usually in messages rather than comments, by people who have never said it aloud to anyone. Can a birth chart show that your partner is God? Not devotion in general. Not religiosity. They mean the specific thing: the soul that relates to the Divine as a bride relates to her beloved, whose worship is not ritual performed at a distance but a marriage lived from the inside. In the bhakti traditions this is called madhurya bhava, the sweete

There is a word we say at every wedding without hearing it. Vivaha. We translate it as marriage and move on, as if the word were a legal category rather than a mantra hiding in plain sight. Listen to it again. Vivaha is built on the Sanskrit root vah, which means to carry, to bear, to flow. The classical grammarians gloss vivaha as the leading away of the bride, the moment she is carried from one home into another. That is the literal, textbook meaning, and I will not pretend

On the conjunction of Ketu, Saturn, and Venus, and the elephant god who eats what everyone else throws away. There is a conjunction that makes ordinary astrologers lower their voice. Ketu, Saturn, and Venus, sitting together. Open most consultation notes and you will find it read as catastrophe. Ruined relationships. Poverty. Isolation. The pleasures of life curdling and withdrawing. Venus, the planet of love and beauty and everything sweet, crushed between the two great male

On grief that became fire, the planet born from a weeping god, and why your Mars makes you bleed. The novice will tell you Mars is the planet of anger. Of accidents and arguments, of real estate and surgery, of the Manglik dosha that ruins marriages. They will hand you a list of fears and call it knowledge. They are not wrong about the symptoms. They have simply never asked where this red planet came from. And if you do not know where a thing was born, you will spend your lif

A meditation on the first confusion, the failed search, and the forgotten Saturn. Before there was a world, there was a god sitting on a flower, and he did not know who he was. This is where the Bhagavata Purana begins the work of creation, and almost no one reads it correctly. We treat it as a charming origin myth, a decorative image for the front of a calendar. Vishnu reclining on the serpent in the cosmic ocean, a lotus rising from his navel, Brahma seated on the bloom, re

There is a particular kind of tiredness that does not come from work. It comes from hoping. You wake up and the day arrives carrying its small promises, this will be the message, this will be the turn, this will finally be the thing. And by evening the promise has changed shape, or dissolved, and you lie down emptied out. Not defeated exactly. Just thinned. And the worst part is that tomorrow you will do it again. The hope will return on schedule, fresh and convincing, as if

You have done everything they told you to do. You scripted. You visualized. You raised your vibration, cut the cords, repeated the affirmations until the words lost their shape in your mouth. You made the vision board. You acted as if. And for a while it even seemed to work, small wins, little confirmations, the universe winking at you. Then the same thing happened again. The same kind of person. The same kind of betrayal. The same collapse, arriving on schedule, wearing a ne