Abstract:
played a significant role in shaping India’s religious and scientific traditions. Employing a historical-analytical method and drawing upon key texts such as Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa and Sūrya Siddhānta, this study examines the origins of Jyotiḥśāstra in its three main domains -mathematical astronomy, ritual omenology, and astrology- through a comparative analysis with Mesopotamian and Greek traditions. It addresses the question of why, unlike in Babylon and Greece, systematic astrology emerged late in India, and how, despite this delay, it attained a central position in India’s educational and cultural systems. The findings reveal that during the Vedic Hindu period, Jyotiḥśāstra was limited to identifying the 27 Nakṣatras (lunar mansions) and determining the Moon’s position for ritual omens, while the planets remained unknown at that time. Precise astronomical calculations and astrology were only incorporated into Jyotiḥśāstra after the beginning of the Puranic-Epic period (around the first centuries BCE and CE), a time when the concept of history and individual destiny first gained significance in Indian thought. From this period onward, astronomy was employed as a tool for predicting individual and collective events, medical astrology (astrological medicine), and governmental decision-making. A key observation is that although this knowledge owes much of its astronomical and astrological framework to Greco-Mesopotamian traditions, it underwent a unique reinterpretation within the Indian intellectual framework by shedding linear conceptions of time and rigid determinism. Instead, it assimilated these elements into the doctrines of karma and reincarnation, thus acquiring a distinct identity.
Machine summary:
Although the Rigveda, the oldest surviving religious document in India, compiled about 2000 years after the Sumerian tablets, does not clearly show the inherent connection between religion and astronomy, unlike examples in Mesopotamia (Eliade 1392 (86-87)), when the first signs of the Indian astronomical system known as Jyotisha Shastra or simply Jyotisha appear in the texts, we witness the fusion of scientific goals with 1.
(1981:8-9 ,Pingree) Accordingly, the Jyotisha tradition is classically divided into three branches: ۱- Ganita (astronomical and mathematical calculations equivalent to modern astronomy); Samhita (Muhurtha) divination based on signs and natural and celestial phenomena Hora or Jataka, the science of astrology and individual or collective horoscopes based on the position of the stars (BS, 9) The key difference between Samhita and Hora is that Samhita deals with determining auspicious or inauspicious times for performing individual and collective rituals such as sacrifice, marriage, and procreation based on the position of the moon in Nakshatras (stellar mansions), while Hora is specifically dedicated to diagnosis and prediction and operates at two levels: -۱- Mundane Astrology through the analysis of celestial signs or collective horoscopes predicts natural events such as floods, earthquakes, wars, etc.
- Answering this question, although difficult, is key to understanding the complexity of religious astronomical developments in the history of India (Yano, 2003: 387) Textual evidence shows that the first explicit references to planets in Sanskrit texts appear only after the establishment of Greeks in the Northwest in the 3rd century BC.
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