Angela Scanlon delves into the world of Vedic astrology

Our columnist – a self-confessed horoscopes and astrology devotee – explores the Vedic variety

On a recent holiday to Mexico, I tricked my very sceptical husband into having a couples astrology reading – Vedic astrology, to be more specific. We’d already booked a babysitter and I didn’t want a hangover, so this seemed like a reasonable way to spend an hour. Now, when I say he’s sceptical, I mean he’s infuriatingly dismissive of anything that can’t be scientifically proven. But it was my birthday, so I forced him.

We were ushered into a beautiful room with a sea view and wicker chairs, and Stefania introduced herself. Originally from Canada, she spends half the year living in the jungle in Mexico, and the other half travelling the world doing readings for clients from Hollywood stars to Silicon Valley CEOs, and everyone in between. I figured I should ask what the hell Vedic astrology is – as a devout follower of mainstream daily astrologer Susan Miller (aka the Astrology Zone), I needed to wrap my head around the Vedic variety if I was going to ‘sleep with the enemy’.

Stefania dismissed normal astrology as inaccurate right off the bat. Rude, if she wasn’t so damn fabulous. Vedic is the ‘most advanced form of quantum physics’. It is, she says, the oldest body of knowledge on the planet that we know of. So old that it comes in Sanskrit (the oldest language – see, it’s old). ‘Jyotish’, the Sanskrit name for Vedic astrology, translates as ‘the science of light’ and is the traditional Hindu system of all astrology. It is based on astronomy and mathematics, and aims to be quite quantifiable, although I suspect most people who explore it are less interested in metrics. The belief is that information travels in light. Vedic astrology studies the impact of the planetary movements and the sunlight deflected from these planets to earth, taking into account where and when you’re born. You’ve got a stamp on you from that time, which sets out your path.

Stefania takes the times, dates and places of our births and puts them into a chart that calculates a total of points. It’s like a matrix with lots of different lines and segments representing various paths/times. So, I ask, ‘Does that mean that a baby girl born next to me on 29 December at 6.05pm in the Rotunda Hospital is on telly in some parallel universe as I am?’ Not exactly, she replies.

With a chart, a Vedic astrologer can ‘read your soul’, tell you what you’re good at, what your path is, where karma lies, where you’re blocked, what patterns you’ve been doing in past lives and what your dharmic (true life) path is. Like a well, the well of self-knowledge, you can go back a thousand times and discover something different. I learned that my husband and I are ‘twin flames’, we may even be the ‘same soul’, although I can’t quite get my head around that. And, quite frankly, it sounds a little incestuous. But, we apparently have a past-life connection and with practice may even be telepathic. Exciting and handy when we run out of loo roll and his phone is dead.

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