Correcting the mismeasure of the Vedic Year/Zodiac (Thea)

" But what is the realistic position of Hindu Society today? Indeed, as the Veda tells us, it has ‘lost the Sun’. It has lost the Divine Maya or Measure as prescribed in the Veda. The Zero is not the Fullness out of which springs an orderly flow of days and nights in the course of the Earth’s annual revolution around the Sun. Access is denied into this sacred wheel because the harmony has been transgressed. There is no increase of the Light in the course of the year that carries us to the apex of the journey, the Makar Sankranti, that sacredmost tenth month as measured from the March Equinox when the victory is finally accomplished and the Earth begins to experience an increase of the Light. Today the harmony is not respected." (Movement for the Restoration of Vedic Wisdom, Manifesto, May 2006)

 "The mis-measure [of the Vedic Year/Zodiac) is 23 days, or a shift from the Solstice on 21-22 December to the current arbitrary 15 January. But with each passing day and month and year the distance goes on increasing through these wandering phantom ayanamshas....Hinduism is still paying for this calculated undermining. It lies at the very heart of its decline. Therefore this is the area we must focus on if we wish to bring back the soul of Vedic Wisdom to the culture, particularly through its vast network of illustrious Temples" (9 December 2006 )

"The main protagonist, as the Veda themselves prove, was Time experienced as the Earth Year of 365 days – our own sacred, divine measure as established by our planet’s rotation around the Sun in that amount of time.... [I]t is the divine measure of the Year that is the missing link between the modern and the ancient. In other words, the Earth’s 365 days divided into 12 months is the key – lamentably, a key that has been entirely lost....This is the situation today regarding the Hindu Temple. In losing the thread to the ancient science the scriptures became empty words because they have not been backed up by the initiatory experience." (14 Sept 2011)

"[Hindus'] timing of the Makar Sankranti... separates it by 23 days from the December solstice, the true temporal gateway into the tenth zodiacal sign Capricorn, the precise timing of which is indispensable for that real and not fictitious cosmic connection.... 

[The real cosmic connection' all hinges on a simple factor: the correct location in time of the Makar Sankranti, which implies the correct timings of the other solstice and the equinoxes; in other words, a time measure balanced on the four pillars that the Earth experiences as the seasons in her annual revolution around the Sun. The Nirayana system has eliminated this seasonal structure entirely...." (2016)

"[When the] cosmic harmony lost its grounding in veda, then both calendar and caste were precipitated into the severe decline we live with today. The key to the desired unity was lost; we are left with only a riot of diversity afflicting both caste and calendar... The calendar has always been the method to unify the grand diversity that is the Sanatana Dharma. This is not a contrived system but is taken from the actual harmony of our solar system. The Vedic legacy in Hinduism demands that the same ancient method be re-instated if unity is to be the factual and not imagined experience of the Samaj, without the imposition of any fabricated uniformity." (2011)

A treatment in three parts presented at the First National Conference on Hindu Calendar Reform (Tirumala, 2010)

"The issue before us is to retrace our steps and to recover [the Cosmic] Order once again.... The harmony today is exactly what it was in the Vedic Age.... This underlying constant is the fourfold balance on the Equinoxes and Solstices, the measure of 365 days of our Earth Year.... Thus, forging a connection with that eternal Constant is the single most important objective of a cosmic-based civilisation. By inference, to lose that connection would mean the disintegration of that eternal dharma.... All of this hinges on the correct Zero Point."

(Tirumala, 24-26 December 2010)

‘I have an important announcement to make:

about 60 temples in Tamil Nadu have just celebrated the Makar Sankranti exactly on the December Solstice, as per the ancient tradition. The trend is obvious….’

‘This Nirayana system has produced chaos.

A cosmic system for sacred observances

that produces such confusion cannot be the right one. The true system produces order and unity, never chaos’.

"[T]he Nirayana system uses the distant sidereal circle of the heavens to construct a horoscope or to determine the time for rituals. In my experience while discussing this aberration I have come to realise that I stand perhaps alone in realising this simple digression from the Vedic path: measurements are done in the wrong circle, thereby throwing the entire exercise off its Vedic moorings. It may be that the confusion arose some centuries ago when astronomy decided to name the constellations the same as the signs of the tropical zodiac. Be that as it may, the fact stands that the tropical/solar wheel has been set aside in favour of the very distant constellations (of the same name unfortunately). My main protest in this regard is that the measure the Earth offers to the system is completely ignored and rendered irrelevant. "

 "The Makar Sankranti – 0 degrees Capricorn/December Solstice – is currently celebrated 23 days late, or 23 days AFTER the actual Solstice. The argument proffered by the Nirayana Pundits for this aberration is that ‘Capricorn is no longer there, at that same point where it was centuries ago but has shifted 23 degrees’, they argue. As absurd as it may seem, they make the mistake of using the wrong circle for locating this crucial point in the heavens, using only the sidereal constellations and not the Tropical Zodiac along the ecliptic as was the custom in the Vedic Age and even throughout the world today. Since that ‘circle’ is hundreds of light years away and bears only scant relation to our solar system, its 0 Point in that distant space is largely unverifiable; hence total confusion prevails: one pundit gives a particular time for the passage, the second gives another, and a third yet another." (2009)

 "This was the turning point for India, when ‘otherworldliness’ became the favoured poise in contrast to the earlier Vedic position of a quest and realisation that was Earth-oriented. Indeed, it was then that the ‘secret of the Veda’ was lost.… The Veda was then distorted to accommodate the Mayavadist idea.… India lost the Divine Measure describing her soul’s truth, that Vedic ‘divine Maya’. This Vedic truth was the Measure of the Year, Earthly and Cosmic, as the distinction is made in cosmology.… The Measure’s inner truth was lost, and its power – above all its power, its potential as a transformative tool. In the way that India is still contending with the consequences of Mayavadism and the ‘illusion of the world’, she is still today contending with the consequences of having lost the Measure of the Year." (19)

"The Nirayana system employed by temple pundits and astrologers, the Capricorn gateway shifts because they are measuring in the wrong circle – not the ecliptic plane but far out in the constellations where there are no solstices. For this reason none can agree on a precise entry date: only the equinoxes and solstices provide the indispensable accuracy demanded for the correct cosmic connection, without which it does not exist. Astronomers have imposed this false measure…without giving deep thought to the issue. The Rig Veda...is clear on this very matter: the 360 pegs-degrees 'shake not in the least'...." (2015)

"I need to point out that Nirayani astrologers base their calculation of the Zero Point ON THE WRONG CIRCLE. You use the sidereal with its constellations composed of Fixed Stars many light years away from Earth. According to your claim that zodiac ‘has shifted’ its Zero Point, for which a rectification is required both for the calendar and all matters astrological. But the true one and only zodiac is the 12-part division of the ecliptic plane, marked off by the four pillars of Earth Time, the equinoxes and solstices. That outer distant circle is the invention of astronomers when astronomy became a separate discipline from astrology. The heavens speak to us in the language of the zodiac symbols. Otherwise we have what the astronomers have given us: a meaningless dark void; they fill it by projecting the zodiac onto those distant stars and imaginatively designing the zodiacal symbols therein – which is a totally inconsequential exercise since those animal symbols do not cover a neat 30 degrees, as the Rig Veda prescribes." (2015)

"Unfortunately Nirayanis…call themselves by the misnomer Vedic Astrologers…. [T]he Nirayanis continue to proclaim: Aries has shifted, it has moved on; it is no longer there (at the March equinoctial point). ‘The solstice has kept its place but the constellations have migrated, just the very opposite of what Vahara has fancied,’ he wrote (India, II, p.7). With this Al Biruni plants the undermining seed of a shifting zodiac [in India], erroneously equated with and measured in the sidereal sphere….

Actually Aries does not ‘exist’ disconnected from the March equinox; similarly with the others on the Rajas/Creation cross. So, to claim, as Al Biruni did, that while the solstice remained in place the constellations (zodiac) have moved away from the zodiacal connection with the Cardinal Cross, reveals a basic ignorance of the cosmic harmony." (2015)

"A true Vedic Astrologer – not the Post-Vedic kind that calls itself ‘Vedic’ – and all the astrology of the ancient world into the present, is geocentric..... Since the constellations are always shifting according to the (mis)calculations of the Post-Vedics, Capricorn/Makar is no longer conjoined to the shortest day of the year – i.e., the December Solstice. Again, by the contrived separation of the inseparable, it is discovered that Post-Vedics know nothing about the Art, much less about the Vedic Journey. Knowledge, as the word implies, must be the foundation of astrology, of zodiacal wisdom. The path of Knowledge can never be understood via, for example, Nakshatras projected onto the sidereal circle. The harmony must be Earth-centred. And it must therefore find its balance on the Cardinal Poles of the Equinoxes and the Solstices." (2009)

"Similar to all ancient cultures in the Vedic Age, sages used the actual rhythms of the Earth as the basis for their calendar. For example, the balancing factor was the four Cardinal Poles – which never changes; as it was then, so it is today...." (2016)