My sincere and humble thanks to Mr Prashant Trivedi for a most absorbing and deeply occult work. This book is an oasis in a veritable desert of information on the lunar mansions or nakshatras (their sanskrit name), an area of Astrology which has always fascinated me.
I found this work to be of unusually high calibre in terms of its erudition, originality and sheer informativeness. It is packed with excellent insights which require many, many hours to digest. All due credit to the author, that he has managed to imbue his masterpiece with some of that ubiquitous spark that distinguishes the classics.
The book carries excellent presentation on each nakshatra or lunar mansion, with their attributes and qualities laid out in a very organised, detailed and easy to read fashion. It is evident that utmost care and scrutiny has gone into it. Mr Trivedi's ability to marry logic, complexity and lucidity enable these often contradictory attributes to be fairly elucidated. The meanings of some of the nakshatras differ from other contemporary works, but none of those authors have tried to back up their views with the same intelligence and careful dissection as Mr Trivedi has achieved.
He evinces an understanding of Jyotish that is steeped in a very advanced and broad understanding of Vedic and metaphysical subjects in general. I found this to be not only a work on Astrology and Cosmology but a commentary on life, death, universal politics, spiritual enlightenment, civilizations - ancient and modern, history, mythology, mystery, psychology, day to day existence, culture and refinement.
What I liked was Mr Trivedi's treatment of profound topics in an unpretentious manner. He applies a no nonsense approach when advising on the pitfalls and disadvantages of more challenging nakshatras in our present climate, but balances this with appropriate remedial measures and suitable courses of action.
The coup d'etat are the highly pleasing colour illustrations which really do convey the essence of each nakshatra in a vivid and exciting way. A great asset to students and professionals of all systems of Astrology. Not for the fainthearted, this is a serious work for dedicated scholars.
In my opinion it raises the standard for other Jyotish works to emulate, and justifiably so, because the diminished quality of Vedic Astrology books by Indian authors is notorious and there are virtually no advanced works by Western authors to set any kind of precedent.
I am deeply impressed and looking forward to Mr Trivedi's future writings.
I purchased this book based on the review by Linda Lee, and I am somewhat disappointed. Of course, I am new to Vedic astrology, and my familiarity with Sanskrit terms is rather limited; i.e., please consider this review as an amateurish one rather than a scholarly one.
This brings up my first disappointment with almost all the books on Vedic astrology that I have looked at, and that is they lack a section or appendix that we (the beginners) may use as a reference for finding definitions of all these terms. These texts are peppered with these terms which sometimes may be defined or described somewhere in the book once, but are rather tedious to find again if you forget them and you need to look them up again while reading some other chapter.
Another major shortcoming of this book is that it provides a lot of general and interesting information on the intricacies and nature of various constellations and even gets into page-long elaborations on their esoteric aspects as well as other topics such as their relationships with vowels and alphabets, celesial lineage, caste, deity, lunar months and day, etc. (with no explanation on how to use such information.) Such information may be useful for some readers, and perhaps belong in there for the sake of completeness. However, hardly any information on matters far more practical and useful, such as the implications of positioning of various planets in these constellations, are provided in this book. Yet, this is what I was most interested in, and in fact the author opens the Introduction to the book with the following statement,"In Vedic system of Astrology... the 27 constellations and not the 12 star-sign form the core of understanding celestial influences on our planet..." But, unfortunately, he then chooses to provide hardlly any information on what these influences actually are on each planet in this 450+ page book. This is my biggest disappointment with this book.
Another area which I hope would be addressed in future editions is a lack of tables and more examples--I could not find a single table in the entire text of this book. Perhaps, a fold-out summary table containing keywords and primary themes of these 27 constellations would be very useful as a quick reference. I am now making my own table for this purpose, but I have a hard time keeping my loose hand-written table attached with the book. Moreover, very few examples are provided, and even those are very limited and sketchy with no charts. Perhaps the best analogy I can provide is that I feel I am sitting at a table to eat for the first time some good-smelling and mouth-watering food piled up on the table, but I am blind-folded and I am not given any spoons, plates, or napkins. In such a situation one my reach out adventurously and grab some bite, but you are not sure if you got the main course, some side dish, or just the food left for your dog. You can imagine how frustrating this experience may become.
Another area of improvement for this book may be using fewer loose and vague terms, which again I find to be my problem with most of astrology books. Terms such as 'well-positioned,' 'such natives,' 'heavily afflicted,' and so on are simply fuzzy, irritating, and can be misleading. Does 'such natives' refer to ascendent, sun, moon, or what, especially when elsewhere in the text terms such as 'with this nakshatra rising' is used? what is meant by 'affliction to this nakshatra?' How is a nakshatra (constellation) afflicted when their energies are supposedly beyond the reach of the solar system and are just supposed to be relayed or filtered through solar system planets in a one-way channel to reach us?
In short, this book is more useful for those who are well-versed in Vedic astrology and its terminology, and perhaps have more practical experience than I have so that they can integrate this information into their existing knowledge base. Otherwise, this might be a nice read, but not very usable or practical.
