Sun or Moon - Which is important?

Readers might be curious about the heading of this article and why this heading? Some might be expecting that I’m going to teach some technique of ascertaining which is important in a chart out of the duo – Sun and Moon. But it’s not so. We are actually keen on just knowing the future and reading the articles that spell out some prediction techniques, whether they work in reality and how much they work becomes a secondary thing though.

Predicting certainly has a commercial value and naturally entices us. But in astrology, we need to also remember that ancients advised us to know the astronomical part too. Fortunately, the ganita job is done by the software these days and we are under no compulsion to know this side. But knowing this side is also important and necessary somewhere.

Coming back to the question “Which is more important – Sun or Moon?”, the question here is related to the observations.

A simple answer to it could be “both of them are important.” But we have certain people who love just the tropical phenomena and thus regard the Sun as the superior since it helps us observe the tropical year made of seasons and the associated solar months. An absurd logic that is floated in support of it even goes to the extreme by saying “Moon does not even have light of its own and gets it from Sun, so it is all the Sun, which is important”.

Ancients were using natural phenomena for their convenience. For them, the moon served the purpose for knowing the day by looking at the moon’s position amongst the stars as well as looking at the size of the disc of the moon to know what we understand as Tithi. The tropical Sun merely served as indicating the end of the seasonal cycle of the year. The Moon did the rest of the job.

Since tithi is nothing but Moon’s longitude minus Sun’s longitude mathematically, Sun too has its role in deciding the tithi. But what is observed to know the tithi is the Moon and not the Sun.

The next important part is the sidereal cycle. One can very well question here that when even modern science finds it difficult to observe the end of Sun’s sidereal cycle at the end of a year (since Sun is observed in day time when stars and the night sky are not visible), how come ancients observed sun’s sidereal cycle and even included it in their astronomical calculations?

The answer to this again can be located within the observations of the moon. By observing Moon’s disc and Moon in the starry sphere (night sky), one can learn about the sidereal cycle of the moon (over a period of time) as well as Moon’s synodic cycle (the cycle of tithis e.g. from amavasya to amavasya). And once Moon’s sidereal cycle as well as the tithi cycle is known, one can calculate Sun’s sidereal cycle since as explained above, the tithi cycle is formed as a result of both the moon’s and sun’s cycles. Thus, the Moon becomes very important observational tool to even know the Sun’s cycle.

In other words, if I deduce and say, “we can know much about Sun (sidereal) from Moon but not Moon from Sun” would not be a wrong statement.

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