Connecting with Adityas - Where to Begin

[00:00:00] Introduction and Welcome

[00:00:00] Fiona Marques: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Vedic Astrology Podcast. My name is Fiona Marks. Today, I have a mind-blowing and heart-opening, and I think ultimately really useful episode for us, about a part of Vedic astrology that I've fallen in love with. has absolutely captured my heart, and I'm thrilled to have with me today a developer who's put together some products to help us to understand Adityas, which are, in my personal opinion, the intrinsic Vedic astrology of India. And I say that because this way of filtering the ecliptic draws on mythology all from the Vedic texts like the Srimad Bhagavatam, the Mahabharata, and various mythological stories known throughout India.

So when I first started learning Vedic astrology, I was really surprised to find out that the Zodiac was Aries and Taurus and Gemini and Cancer and, I thought that these were Greek imagery and Greek mythology. So it's taken me a while of practicing Vedic astrology to find a system that I feel truly reflects the culture, the philosophy, and the value of Vedic thought, and that is the Aditya system. Now, not that many people teaching it at the moment, and I've been learning from Ernst Wilhelm. I know uh, Carla, I think, is working on developing the system as well, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how that all fits together. I guess it's a time of renaissance of this knowledge. one of the things that I hear from people who understand Vedic astrology and maybe have been introduced a little bit to the Adityas and seen some of the videos maybe on YouTube, that it can be overwhelming knowing where to start.

There seems to be a lot of knowledge to catch up on, a lot of different stories, and it's just too much. Just don't-- can't even begin. And that's where Josh comes in. So first and foremost, Josh, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming along.

[00:02:08] josh: Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me

[00:02:10] Fiona Marques: Now tell us a little bit about How have you ended up here developing some tools that help us with Adityas? What's been your story?

[00:02:20] josh: I was always interested in, weird woo-woo astrology stuff and also in software. So that's always been a sort of interest in my life. I started studying with Ernst around the beginning of 2024. But I didn't have the money to buy Kala, so that was an opportunity for me to get back into programming, and I actually started writing my own astrology software.

It wasn't like a big fancy GUI thing like Kala. It was just the calculations. So that really helped me do the calculations and to learn about astrology in that way. But then at some point, I realized that I actually don't wanna be a reader. That was the idea, maybe I could make a career doing that, and I was like, "No, that's not for me, I don't think."

That's when I started to get into app development. So my original software that I wrote, I did it all by hand. I didn't use any AI. So it was all done that way. But then I started to learn about LLMs and Claude, and I got into Claude, and so then I just, I had all this astrology knowledge, and I was like what do I do with it?"

And it seemed like a good way to mix the two. And also, I had been working on-- I briefly started working on a project that was like a really big app, and I-- it was overwhelming for me. It was like a group project, and I was like, "Okay, this is too much." So I needed to step back and be like, "Let me do something simple.

Let me learn from the beginning," since I had never done apps before. So that's where the idea for Sun Flare came from. It's just like a simple app, and then there's also, you're talking about it's overwhelming. Like there's eighty-four beings, like that's a lot. So how do we mix both of those, right?

And so that was just the basic idea. Once Ernst talked about the Hora and the Triamsamshra and how those beings work, it was like, "Okay, what are the beings right now?" So that's, you open the app, and then you see all the beings right now, the nine beings that are activated. So that was basically how I got into that.

[00:04:14] Fiona Marques: It was the beginning. This is an amazing story because I'm meeting Josh for the first time today as well and I have both his SunFlare app on my phone and 84Beings I have on the computer. and they're incredible. For me, they're great tools, and I'm assuming that if you're programming and pumping out apps all the time, and here I am finding out that we live in a world where you can build these things with AI and you've got this, as you said, the background in understanding how to put together astrology software 'cause you'd started that as a project.

But what you've been able to produce I'm mind-blown. So SunFlare has come up first in our discussion, That's how I connected with you as well. Let's just a little bit about that. Maybe it's a, a little more simple for people to be able to access the tool. First of all, it's called SunFlare, and you can get it for Android phone or your Apple phone. 

[00:05:08] josh: it's not actually available on the Apple App Store. They actually rejected it. They have this thing called design spam. They say we have too many astrology apps, so anyway, there's a--

[00:05:18] Fiona Marques: what they're missing. Oh

[00:05:19] josh: I know that's-- And I wrote an appeal, and I was like, "Guys, you don't have any Aditya apps. That's not a thing you have on your store."

And they were like, "We don't care." So anyway, so you can get it on your iPhone through what's called a progressive web app, and there's instructions for how to do it on the Sunflare site. 

Yeah.

[00:05:36] Fiona Marques: aside that technicality,

[00:05:37] Sunflare App - Where are the planets in Adityas today?

[00:05:37] Fiona Marques: Sunflare, you can download it and put it on your phone, and this is going to show you where the planets are in the sky at the moment from an Aditya's perspective

[00:05:48] josh: Yes, that's correct. You open it up and it shows you right now. The first page it shows you the, the current Aditya with the current Rishi and the current Naga. And then you have three more pages. So based on the Hora mostly. So the second page will be the Aditya Hora, and that has the Gandharvas and the Rakshasas.

And then the third page is the Naga Hora, which has the Yakshas and the Apsaras. And then of course the third page is the Rishi, and that actually spans both Horas. So that sort of doesn't fit the pattern, that's okay. So each page shows the beings that are activated right now. And there is a time picker, so you can change the time and go to any time you want.

But the focus is, yeah, what's happening right now in the sky?

[00:06:34] Fiona Marques: Yeah. So if you download it and open it up, it will show you today right now.

[00:06:38] Overview of the Āditya Ecliptic – Hōra lords, Trimśāṁśa lords and more

[00:06:38] Fiona Marques: And we're already throwing in a lot of jargon that people may not have even been exposed to yet. If can think of the Adityas as a way of looking at the ecliptic. We have a sidereal way of looking at the ecliptic.

We have a tropical way of looking at the ecliptic. There's an Adityas way of looking at the ecliptic. There are probably lots of other ways of looking at the ecliptic as well. And each 30-degree segment of that 360-degree circle is an Aditya, a Rasi, a sign, just like you might be used to the idea already of Rasis and signs. This Rasi now has its Aditya attached to it. And this is really special because what The SunFlare does is not only show you where these planets are in this 30 degree, in whatever 30-degree space they're in, it gives you a little snippet of insight into that being, doesn't it?

[00:07:41] josh: Yes, that's correct. You can tap on almost anything. There are emblems for each being type. There are cards for each specific being. There are Aditya glyphs. So any of those you can tap, and you can see all of them. So the main interest would be to tap on the card that has the being name, and it will show you if it's an Aditya it's the love of that Aditya.

If it's the Rishi, the law of that Rishi, and then there's a description, and then there's some reflection questions for each one. And these are all written by me. They're my interpretation, so it doesn't necessarily always agree with Ernst or whatever other people have said. So just so you know that. It's just what I think, just what I thought learning about them.

And so for all the other 60 beings besides the Adityas and the Rishis, I also made my own subtitles for them. So just my own little blurb, like my summary about what I think it is.

[00:08:35] Fiona Marques: That's great. And I've seen some of those because as Josh is pointing out there, if you've been learning with Ernst, he has given us the love of each Aditya. And I think this is why I've fallen in love with the Adityas right back, 18 months or so ago, was because this system is based on a circle of love.

It's saying that the ecliptic itself is the goddess of love, Aditi. And therefore, each segment, the 12 segments, is a portion of that love. A way that humans can experience this totality of love that would just be too overwhelming, too undifferentiated for us to comprehend. So each Aditya has a form of love, and each rishi was also given a type of law, a philosophy that gets us through that part of the sky. But Josh, you're saying that you've been able to come up with a little title, a little hook for each of the other beings as well. So that, that helps for those people that like connections. It helps us to grab ahold of a very big concept maybe with a tagline. So that's also really helpful in Sun Flare.

And then o- other jargon that people might hear you saying and not quite be grasping is the Hora. Although Vedic astrologers are aware of different Vargas, in the way that Ernst is teaching them, we're highlighting two Vargas as being particularly important for understanding the Adityas, and that is Hora and the Trimshamsha. So let's start with the Hora. The Hora people may have heard of and may use, or they might call it the D2, splits a sign into 15 degrees. the masculine signs, the first 15 degrees belongs to the sun, and the second 15 degrees belongs to the moon. And in the feminine signs, the first 15 degrees belongs to the moon, and the second 15 degrees belongs to the sun. But what's interesting is that allows us to see a deity, a planet, in this case the sun and the moon, has, has ownership of or very much interest in a particular amount of degrees in each of these Aditya Rashis. 

[00:10:41] josh: in Sunflare it's called Aditi territory, where I say it's where your love wants to flow out into the world, and Nāga territory, which is, bringing things up and releasing them from inside.

So in 84 Beings I call them soul stances. So you have the Aditi soul stance and the Nāga soul stance. And so that's, how the planet is oriented to help you, like how that love is expressing through you. So the Aditi soul stance is more about externally, and the Nāga soul stance is more about internally

[00:11:11] Fiona Marques: Yeah. So these are two of the beings that are associated with the Aditya system. The Aditya itself, the deities we're giving to the sun, and the moon qualities we're giving to the Nagas the subconscious serpents that help us deal with all of our traumas. Able to go down deep into our unconscious, into our somatic body where things are held onto and are holding us back.

And I love this system of astrology for so many reasons, but one of them is for the Nagas. Seeing where it is that you're being held back. So that's something that you can see in the sky right now on the Sun Flare app. And then the other Varga that's really important is the Trimshamsha. And this is also called the D30, and has its own uses in Vedic astrology around health and accidents and events that might occur.

So it's a really important Varga. As part of the setup for that Varga written into the sutras is this that degrees in the 30 degrees belongs to one of the planets, one of the five embodied planets. So we already have the sun and moon associated with the D2, and so it's our five elemental planets that are associated with the Trimshamsha, and they become the Trimshamsha lords. And we are allocating those to beings. And this is how the number of beings is exponentially getting bigger and bigger until, as you said, it turns out there are 84 beings if we look at the Adityas like this. So there's lots of richness in each Rashi because now we have not only the Hora view, like you were saying, a soul stance, but we have this elemental Is there anything that you want to say about the, the Trimshamsha lords?

[00:13:06] josh: one thing is that they're assigned to planets originally, but in, the Aditya system, we talk about beings. So each of the being types is associated with a certain planet, So Mars is associated with Gandharvas, Saturn with Rakshasas, Jupiter with Rishis Yakshas with Mercury, and Apsaras with Venus.

so the Gandharvas and the Rakshasas, Mars and Saturn are all in the Sun Hora. And Yakshas and Apsaras Mercury and Venus are all in the Moon's Hora. And then Rishi, Jupiter, he splits. He's some in one Hora and some in the other. 

And it's interesting the degrees, Five, five, eight, seven, five, and that's for...

[00:13:48] Fiona Marques: masculine to feminine, yeah

[00:13:49] josh: And then in feminine signs, it's the opposite. Five, seven, eight, five, five. So you have that sort of imbalance, which is interesting

[00:13:57] Fiona Marques: Yes, it is really interesting. But then of course you have the two sides meeting each other. So the feminine side of five degrees say ending at the Apsara. The next feminine sign starts with the Apsara. So you actually get 10 degrees of Apsara,

[00:14:12] josh: Yes, that's true.

[00:14:13] Fiona Marques: one Aditya and one to the next Aditya.

[00:14:15] josh: Yeah

[00:14:15] Fiona Marques: what you can see in Sun Flare when you're following planets as they transit, is that they might spend extra long in the Gandanta space or extra long in the Apsara space because they're transiting from one sign to another.

[00:14:29] josh: It's true

[00:14:30] Fiona Marques: for me, it just adds a whole lot of richness to the Rashi space, and it allows us, when we're thinking about predicting, it allows us to see where an event is happening in a particular being. So for example, if you follow my podcast, Fiona's Adityas podcast, Laura and I were just talking about the eclipse that's happening on the 12th of August, which being it will be taking place in and how that might, yeah, allow for various interpretations.

So I think if, you're interested in Adityas, if you're catching this bug like I certainly did it opens up a whole another level of prediction interpretation as well. Okay, so this is the Sun Flare app. You could be going, "Fiona, what are you and Josh talking about?" You could go download this app and right now have a look and just it day by day.

Just begin to become connected to the rhythm of the Adityas through a simple app, which Josh was actually telling me works offline as well.

[00:15:39] josh: Yeah, it certainly works offline. I'm not sure if you have an Apple iPhone since it's a progressive web app. I'm not sure if that will, but the app itself does work offline. Yeah

[00:15:49] Fiona Marques: Yeah, great. Okay, so Josh and I were originally gonna get together and talk about that some probably two or more months ago. But life has a way of making sure that divine timing takes place because I just didn't have the schedule to be able to connect any earlier than today. And in the meantime, enormous flurry of creativity has happened over in Josh land because 84beings.com is up and live and rich and useful today.

And what is 84beings.com, Josh?

[00:16:22] 84Beings.com - Where are the Planets in my Birth Chart?

[00:16:22] josh: 84beings.com takes the idea of Sun Flare further, I would say. The thing is, like you said, the Adityas are overwhelming, but they're really useful, and I th- wanted to help more people start to understand them. I wanted it to get out further into the world. Now, as I said, don't really wanna be a reader, and I did write the Sun Flare descriptions, but that was all I'm was good for.

They're pretty short, but, there's so much more richness and depth. So I wanted, some more depth and some more substance to that. So I reached out to Laura Barratt 'cause I know that she was studying the Adityas, and I asked her if she wanted to collaborate. So the base idea was, yeah, let's get it out into the world more, and then she is writing reports.

So right now we have Sun in each Aditya report and Moon in each Aditya report, and we're developing more. And so if you go to 84beings.com, you can, There's a-- There's also another app called Meet Your Beings app. And you can actually look at your chart. So you can enter your birth information, and it will show you a wheel chart with all the Adityas and the planetary placements, and everything is clickable.

So you click on the planet glyph, and it'll show you the being that planet is activating. There's descriptions for each of the being types. So there's a panel that'll show you your beings, and it'll show you the planet and the being type and the specific being. So if you don't know the planets also, you can click on the planet, and it'll show you a description of the planet.

And if you click on the being type, it'll be like a Gandharva. What is a Gandharva? Most of us probably don't know what that is. So it'll show you a short description of what that means, and then the specific Gandharva, you can also click on that. And all the descriptions in that app are from Sun Flare itself, so they're very similar.

But, more focused on your chart, whereas Sun Flare is focused on what's happening right now.

[00:18:15] Fiona Marques: Exactly. Exactly. And so if you have been listening to this, or if you've looked at Sunflare before and you're like, "Yeah, but what about my chart?" I just wanna recommend 84beings.com to you because you can right now put in your own birth details and produce your chart, which will give you your specific view of Adityas for you, which beings you're interacting with, and a description and some reflection questions.

So it's a great way to really personalize the experience of Adityas, to take this overwhelming amount of information and just begin by looking only at the one that's relevant to you and see if it's insightful or not. And it really... It's very beautiful to look at, Josh, and it's really self-explanatory.

It just presents it for you right there. You can interact with it straight away

[00:19:10] josh: Good. I'm glad to hear that it's self-explanatory. It's always hard for me 'cause I understand how it works, but it's hard to know if people who use it understand how it works. And yes, the point is to make it beautiful, so I'm glad that, I'm glad that's coming across

[00:19:25] Fiona Marques: Yeah. Yeah. And do you have a background in art? Is that's what's kind of a part of your toolkit?

[00:19:32] josh: I have a background in wanting things to be beautiful.

[00:19:34] Fiona Marques: Yeah

[00:19:35] josh: I don't know if I necessarily have a background in art as such, but, and I have to say, the images were AI-generated, so that's probably obvious to most people, but I should be clear about that. But, I did specific work for that.

I found images I liked, and I made what's called a LoRA, a low-rank adaptation, and then I wrote prompts. So I just wanted to say that it's not-- I don't think of those images as slop. I know some people just say that anything AI makes is slop, but I actually did put intention and time into those images. So

[00:20:07] Fiona Marques: Yeah. And we're really, especially for us as Westerners, we're really being introduced to a mythology that we don't currently have any images in our minds potentially for. Perhaps if you have grown up in Indian culture, you actually might know a lot of these stories, and you might have some images already, which is really handy.

But for loads of us we don't have anything, so it can be really helpful just with all this information and the variety and the differentiation to have an image this is the key, one or two key pieces of information that helps me remember about this being. so I think the visual is really helpful. And we do live in an amazing time of understanding what we can do with AI and what we can't. So

[00:20:55] josh: Yeah, I would never be able to create all those images by myself by dr- drawing by hand, I don't have that sort of talent and the sort of time it would take, 

[00:21:03] Fiona Marques: yeah,

[00:21:03] josh: So it's useful in some ways, for sure

[00:21:05] Fiona Marques: Yeah, great. All right. And people can, if they want to progress to purchasing reports is that right, from 84Beings?

[00:21:14] josh: Yes, that's correct. If you go on the main page and then in the up nav bar at the top, that'll be reports. And also on the shop page, you can also enter your birth chart there, and it will filter all of the reports to show you your specific ones.

[00:21:28] Fiona Marques: Yeah.

[00:21:29] josh: Yeah

[00:21:30] Fiona Marques: Great. There's a lot of information there without going down to that, so don't feel discouraged. You can definitely get a whole lot of information just from interacting with the site itself.

[00:21:41] What have you learned from the process?

[00:21:41] Fiona Marques: What have been some insights for you from this whole process? As you say, you started in 2024 coming into astrology assuming through the zodiac animals, and then this, this process of being exposed to Adityas, and then the process of trying to turn them into something useful. What, what have been some of the insights that you remember from this experience?

[00:22:04] josh: The first thing that really got me into astrology, actually, I was studying human design,

Was like, "I need to understand the planets." 'Cause Ernst has a video called Vedic Astrology and Human Design, and in there he talks about the planets, not as the planets in human design and the planets in Vedic astrology.

No, they're just the planets. I was like, "Okay, I need to understand the planets." And then I had known about Vedic astrology, and I knew that they used a sidereal zodiac and that people said it was aligned to the stars and therefore it was the right one, and I was like what does that mean?" So that was my thing.

I had to understand what does that mean? And as soon as I understood it, I was like, "That doesn't make sense to me. I think tropical makes more sense." So actually I'd heard Ernst on a podcast a few years before that talk about doing Vedic astrology with tropical zodiac, and I-- So I was like that's interesting."

And then he brings up the Adityas, and I had a sort of similar feeling like, yeah, a lot of that just makes sense. The structure of the South Indian chart and the equinoxes and the solstices and the way the Jaimini aspects work. Some people focus on their experience, and wanna be scientific, which is great.

For me, I just go with what makes sense to me. So I'm just like, yeah, it just is more logical. But, also during that time, I've realized what my focus is, and it's not actually on a specific system. My focus is actually on helping people to learn about themselves. There's a lot of debate and controversy, oh, sidereal, tropical, and people can get really upset about it and stuff, and I'm not into that.

I don't really care about that. I think that you can use sidereal to learn about yourself also. And it's really about the quality that you're putting into your introspection and, how you lived your life and that sort of thing. So that's really my focus. Now, I think the Adityas are really great and, that's why I'm doing this also.

But of course, Laura is, most of the one doing the content, and she-- I feel like she believes more in it specifically, which is fine. It's great, but my focus is more on, helping people to learn more about themselves,

[00:24:15] Fiona Marques: Yeah.

[00:24:16] josh: I think that this is a great way to do it.

[00:24:18] Fiona Marques: yeah, you've really done that, Josh. Absolutely. And I think it's good that you brought that up because we have forgotten to mention that when people put their information into 84 Beings and it brings up your chart, it's going to look different. One, it's gonna be in a circle, which you might be used to either North Indian or South Indian style, so it's gonna look a little bit different. But it's also going to have your planets in elements modalities and genders that you were not expecting. You were thinking that it was the other one or yeah. So be relaxed that when you put your data into 84 Beings, your chart is gonna come up new and fresh, and things will be in different places than you thought that they would be.

[00:25:00] josh: Well, I have to say that if you're not familiar with the circle chart at all, then you may not notice that actually, because there's no reference to the tropical or sidereal on the chart in 84 Beings. So if you're not familiar with the Adityas, then you won't necessarily know that. if you know your Ascendant is in tropical Pisces, and then you see it's in tropical Dhātā, that might confuse you.

But if you don't know that, then just look at the eightyfourbeings.com chart and you just let it come into you. Yeah, you don't have to worry about that stuff

[00:25:29] Fiona Marques: Yeah. Yeah. And I certainly also found that the descriptions of the beings really connected with me. When I first moved over to Adityas, I found that these beings that accompany the chariot, the sun's chariot through the year, spoke to me in a way that astrology had never connected with the truth about me and my relationship with myself Vedic astrology couldn't see.

It just didn't have the richness to do it. And when I first came over to Adityas, I would just say to people, "It's like I've been, using a a watercolor set that only had black, white, and gray." That w- And that was Vedic astrology for me. And the Adityas is a watercolor set that has every color under the rainbow, and it's just the potential, the richness, the different levels, just came alive. So I hope that other people have that experience too, and that you'll go check it out. Anything else that we wanna add or say, Josh, about Sun Flare or 84 Beings?

[00:26:35] josh: I have a nerdy thing from what you said earlier. So you're talking about sidereal, tropical, and Aditya. I just wanted to mention that Aditya is a tropical system.

[00:26:45] Fiona Marques: Yeah,

[00:26:45] josh: It's based on the equinoxes and the solstices. It's just where we say it starts is different.

[00:26:51] Fiona Marques: Yes.

[00:26:52] josh: I just said that 'cause 'cause I like to be precise about that sort of thing

[00:26:56] Fiona Marques: That's good, but you have to be. When you're programming something, you have to be.

[00:27:00] josh: Yeah. Yeah

[00:27:01] Fiona Marques: And you have actually some other apps as well, just to give people an idea that there are other things that you are dabbling into.

[00:27:10] More Apps?

[00:27:10] Fiona Marques: Do you think that there are new projects coming as well? Talk a little bit about your forest of creativity

[00:27:17] josh: Yeah. Right after Sunflower, I made an app called Inner Orbits, which is based on astronomy and astrology. So y- when you open it up, it's an infinitely scrollable view of space with each of the planets. And so when you click on them, it shows you the current sign that it's in, and the default is Aditi, but you can also change it to tropical and sidereal.

And then on the left, you have astronomy, and so you can see where it is in the solar system, and its motion, and its synodic cycle, and a bunch of stuff like that. And then the astrology part actually focuses on the Lajjitaadi Avasthas, which you may be familiar with if you have seen this podcast before.

I'm sure Fiona has talked about it. And I've rebranded that as inner dialogues 'cause that's how the planet thinks about itself.

[00:28:03] Fiona Marques: Yep

[00:28:04] josh: So if you click on Mercury, you'll see the inner dialogues that Mercury is experiencing based on the Lajjitaadi Avasthas that he's getting. So that's something that you can check out.

I also have an app called Ephemeris Dashboard, which is really nerdy if you really wanna go deep into it. So basically, all astrology software is based on the Swiss Ephemeris, and it computes the planetary positions and the house positions, but it also computes so many other things like the nodes through all the planets and when the eclipses are, and midpoints, and stars, fixed stars.

So the thing is, the Swiss Ephemeris is mostly for programmers. To really use it, you have to know about programming, but I made a GUI for it, so you can just open it up and all of the calculations, all the options are right there. So those are the two big things that I was focusing on. Lately though, I've been, I've been focused on 84 Beings, and I'm sort of-- I'm open to what's next.

I don't have any other big projects right now, so I'm I'm being like I'm waiting to see what that next big thing will be.

[00:29:07] Fiona Marques: Yeah.

[00:29:08] josh: Yeah.

[00:29:09] Fiona Marques: watch this space.

[00:29:12] Conclusion and Farewell

[00:29:12] Fiona Marques: Okay, Josh, it's been great to catch up with you. Thanks for coming along

[00:29:16] josh: My pleasure

[00:29:17] Fiona Marques: to the podcast and thanks more importantly for sharing your own response to the Adityas and breaking it down into something that people can begin in a little step-by-step way to, to connect with and to find meaning, and through that maybe gain the confidence to learn more about it. So I think you've done us a great service for all of us, and I really

[00:29:37] josh: Yeah.

[00:29:38] Fiona Marques: time.

[00:29:38] josh: Thank you.

[00:29:39] Fiona Marques: Josh.

[00:29:39] josh: Good to be here.

[00:29:40] Fiona Marques: here.

[00:29:40] josh: Yeah

[00:29:41] Fiona Marques: Okay. Bye everyone. 

[00:29:44] josh: