There’s this meme doing the rounds on Facebook comparing Western vs Vedic astrology. On one level it’s just a bit of fun that I can appreciate. Vedic astrologers do have a somewhat deserved reputation for being grimly fatalistic.
At the risk of stereotyping, an Indian astrologer can tell an Indian client “… when you turn 37 your mother in law will poison you with yellow berries… and you’ll wander the streets alone and hungry until you die” etc. and the Indian client will stoically thank the astrologer for their service. If an astrologer were to say such things to a Western client familiar only with the watered down language of your garden variety Western astrology, well, they could have a court case on their hands!
In the olden days, Western astrologers thought nothing of predicting death (often with amazing accuracy) along with all the possible calamities you could imagine a human being having to suffer. Just read some of the traditional Western astrology interpretations linked to fixed stars. Fatalism is not in essence a Vedic astrology disease.
Of course astrologers, Western or Vedic, should not be frightening people unnecessarily, but if they become too preoccupied with sanitizing their interpretations of anything that could possibly ruffle a clients mental equilibrium, you could end up with an astrology that can’t speak to and address life’s problems and tragedies with real insight and understanding. Astrology becomes superficial and, when confronted with real tough questions, impotent.
In India, in my opinion, some practitioners abuse their clients with the promise of relief from life’s problems through magical charms, rituals and trinkets. Likewise I think Western astrologers fail their clients when they sugar coat and bypass hard reality with empty pseudo-philosophical cliches.
The grain of truth depicted in this meme points to some important issues in relation to the modern evolution of astrology; specifically, there is the danger of sanitizing the language of astrology to make it palatable (a process which has gone too far in the West), and the danger of being too rooted in a medieval world view that no longer bears much resemblance to modern reality (which is something of a problem with traditional Indian astrology).
Ultimately this is not about one system of astrology being better or worse than the other. The features of Western and Vedic astrology that are being compared and contrasted here point to a basic challenge one confronts in the practice of astrology: traditions, texts, tools, techniques, symbols and astrological methodologies need to be discerningly translated and communicated to meet the specific needs of specific people in specific times and climes. In this sense astrology needs to be constantly and creatively re-framed and re-articulated and re-interpreted, while it’s essence remains eternally unchanged.
In essence there is no difference between Western and Vedic astrology.