You are here because you want to learn astrology, starting with Western tropical astrology and then moving on to Indian astrology (also called Vedic astrology or Jyotish). This will allow you to combine the best of both approaches to interpret horoscopes (and lives) with more insight and depth than with either approach alone. On this blog, there is a large and growing number of posts on many topics in astrology, aimed at different levels of learning requiring varying amounts of background information. Where exactly to start your learning, and how to acquire a cohesive and meaningful repertoire of knowledge?
The challenge, dear reader, is this: you may already know a little, somewhat more, or a lot. You may want to jump directly to posts that are on topics that are new to you, or browse posts on known topics so you can refresh your knowledge or gather new perspectives. So where to start and how to keep going?
By Chronology
A good starting point is to know how the posts are organized and categorized. I have organized the posts in a way that the later the post on a topic, the more background it needs. So, if for example you are a complete novice in astrology, then your best bet is to start with the very first post on this blog, which was on January 1, 2021 and proceed in chronological order. The Archives section groups posts by month and year, which makes it easy to follow the chronology.
For the first couple of years and more, through May 2023, I only posted on Western astrology. If you have know all the topics that are covered in these posts, you know enough astrology to be reasonably proficient at interpreting Western horoscopes. At which point, you can start learning Jyotish, on which I first posted in June 2023. (I will keep posting on Western astrology as well, we’re not done with it by any means! I am just saying that up until May 2023 there’s sufficient knowledge to do respectable work with chart analysis.)
If you practice Jyotish solely, this is not the site for you because I am addressing an audience that is coming to Jyotish after learning Western astrology, just like I did. With this in mind, many of my posts on Jyotish will refer to your previous knowledge of Western astrology to highlight explicit contrasts with the latter. And other posts will combine both Western astrology and Jyotish in interpretation–this, I believe, is a unique feature of this blog that presents a distinctive approach in using astrology to understand a life.
By Categorized Level
Every post is pegged at a certain level, be it beginner or intermediate or advanced. So for instance if you have a basic knowledge of Western astrology (you know a good bit about planets and signs but not much more), you can look up the Category section of this blog and go directly to the posts that are in the Intermediate group, which starts with aspects and houses and moves on to forecasting. Of course, tagging a post as beginner, or intermediate, or advanced is my personal assessment based on experience. For instance, I consider aspects and houses to be an intermediate level of knowledge in Western astrology, while you might think of aspects as basic, but houses as intermediate.
I also categorize Jyotish posts into levels, but a beginner level Jyotish post will include aspects and houses because I assume you already know Western astrology at a reasonable level of proficiency, which includes knowing about aspects and houses in a Western horoscope. Thereafter, transitioning to aspects and houses in Jyotish is only a matter of knowing the differences since the root idea is the same. The categories that apply to Jyotish will be named as “Jyotish …” so there is confusion with same named levels in Western astrology.
By Categorized Topic
You may wish to learn about a particular topic in astrology, either a specific technicality in a horoscope such as aspects/planets/houses, or a higher level interpretive subject such as forecasting or relationship. You can jump to any such group listed in the Category section. Topics are orthogonal to level, so in any topic you may find posts that are a mix of basic, intermediate and advanced.
By Keyword
If you are interested in a deep dive or a cross sectional view of a particular narrow area, you can search for it by keyword using the Search feature on the blog. So, for instance, if you search by “ascendant”, you will get a search result set that consists of blog posts that refer to the ascendant. The match list will include both Western and Jyotish posts, arranged in a very specific order: posts that have the keyword in the title will be presented as a group at the top of the list, in order of latest to earliest, and this group will be followed by all blog posts that do not have the keyword in the title but refer to it somewhere in the body, also arranged from latest to earliest. By the time you are done reading all the matching posts, you will know a host of characteristics of the ascendant (depth), and you will know how to read it in the context of a horoscope as a whole (breadth).
At Random
Sometimes you might feel the itch to just randomly read a post. You may arrive at an arbitrary choice in one of several ways such as picking randomly from the small set of latest posts, picking from all the posts in a named category, or posts that are in the search result of a keyword. As you read the post, you might find that you need to go back and fill in some background information before you continue. Often, you may be able to do this by following links in that post to relevant concepts that were covered before, and in this way build a chain of posts that constitute a cohesive thread of knowledge around the triggering random selection.
For instance, say you randomly landed on the post titled “Mercury, Venus, and Mars – Insights by C.E.O Carter“. This post covers a good amount of ground. When you get into the post, you will see links to Mercury, Venus, and Mars. If you follow the link to Mercury, you will land on the Mercury page, which is one of the very early posts. On the Mercury page is a link to inner planets, that you could follow if you want to know more about the inner planets as a group. Backing up to the initial post where you started, as you keep reading, you will see more links: to aspects, to Pluto, Scorpio and Aries, to the 5th house, Leo, and the Sun, to the mutable signs, to the horoscope wheel, and to Libra. By the time you have finished reading this post, you will have integrated a slew of connected factors into a meaningful story. This is exactly what astrologers strive to do!
