Restoring Dignity to a Method Mocked and Mangled

Astrology, as popularly conceived in the modern world, bears little resemblance to the intellectual, spiritual, and psychological discipline known in Sanskrit as Jyotiṣa.

What circulates through popular media, horoscopes, memes, predictive slogans, constitutes not a continuation of the tradition, but its caricature. The question before us is not whether astrology should be “performed” or “modernized,” but whether we can remember and reconstitute the discipline of Jyotiṣa as it was originally intended: a science of light (jyoti), grounded in śāstra, directed toward self-knowledge, and concerned with the psycho-cosmic order of reality.

To “remember” Jyotiṣa is to engage in an act of re-membering, literally reassembling, what has been fragmented through centuries of commercialization and reduction. In this process, we are not merely recovering an antiquarian curiosity, but restoring a living system of knowledge that illuminates both the cosmos and the psyche.

At its core, Jyotiṣa is not a predictive technique, nor a cultural artifact, but a soteriological science: a discipline concerned with liberation through understanding. The Grahas are not planets in the modern astronomical sense, nor mere symbols to be manipulated for entertainment. They are intelligible principles, archetypal powers that structure human attention, motivation, conflict, adaptation, and transformation. To interpret them is to analyze the very architecture of subjectivity.

The decline of Jyotiṣa into spectacle, into predictions sold for consumption, into the trivialization of the Grahas as icons or emojis, signals not the irrelevance of the discipline, but the failure to uphold its dignity. To restore that dignity requires a twofold movement: a return to śāstra, to the textual and philosophical foundations of the tradition; and a commitment to inquiry, in which the principles of Jyotiṣa are tested, lived, and integrated within the psyche.

Such a restoration is not a matter of nostalgia, nor of branding. It is not a “new astrology.” It is, rather, a resurrection of Jyotiṣa as a contemplative science, a discipline situated between metaphysics and psychology, between cosmology and lived experience.

To practice Jyotiṣa in this sense is not to predict events, but to perceive order. It is not to escape the world, but to participate in its deeper structure. It is not to adopt an identity, but to encounter the Grahas as mirrors of the psyche and teachers of the Self.

The task, then, is not performance but remembrance. Not entertainment, but truth. Not a trend, but a path.