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Jyotish Star of the Month

A Conversation with Astrologer Kenneth Johnson

By Juliana Swanson
Interview Date: 2/12/2014

Juliana Swanson: Where did you grow up, and what first brought you to be interested in astrology?

Ken Johnson: I grew up in an environment which was by no means calculated to nurture an interest in astrology � I came to birth as a middle-class baby boomer in the prosperous and relentlessly conservative suburbs of Orange County, California. I suppose my initial interest in spiritual matters could be traced to my father�s unexpected death when I was thirteen (Ketu in the Ninth). It brought me a close experience of human mortality at an age when I wasn�t fully capable of understanding it � so I began to search.

Despite Orange County�s notoriously conservative reputation, I had access to a local SRF temple as well as the nearby spiritual smorgasbord which was Hollywood; thankfully my mother was an intellectual agnostic who set no limits on my mystical explorations.

Juliana: And what was your first introduction to astrology?

Ken: That arrived on the scene when I was in my early twenties. I was living on a house boat in Amsterdam. One of my housemates (or boat-mates?) was an astrologer; he also read the Tarot. His daily comments about planets, signs, and the Major Arcana were a mystery to most of us who lived on the boat. I liked to imagine that I could more or less make out what he was saying; then one day he told me: �You know, Ken, you have a real talent for symbolic languages.�

A talent? Oh, that was good�. So I began to study in earnest. And I was hooked from that time forward. I was practicing Western astrology professionally by the time I was twenty-five.

Juliana: How and when did you find yourself interested in Vedic astrology?

Ken: I had never forgotten India. I had never forgotten my early spiritual adventures with the Sanatana Dharma. I still made my way to the Vedanta Society or the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in Los Angeles now and then. In those days very little Jyotish was available; there were just a few imported books from India, almost hidden next to Rudhyar, Dobyns, and Marc Edmund Jones on the shelves. I used to pick them up and stare at them without comprehension. When more information about Jyotish began to appear on the shelves during the 1980s, I jumped into it immediately.

Juliana: What teacher(s) inspired you, mentored you, or have been your strongest support along the way?

Ken: The real breakthrough came in the late 1980s. I had just moved to Santa Fe, so I wrote to David Frawley, told him that I was hungering to learn Jyotish but had no money for study, and wondered whether I could be helpful with any projects, seeing as I had a degree in Comparative Religions and had acted as copy editor for a number of Buddhist publications. David responded by sending me over a thousand pages of Bepin Behari�s magnum opus � typed on an old Underwood on rice paper, the whole thing tied up with string. He said: �Someone needs to edit this.� So I did.

Juliana: That must have been an amazing as well as a challenging learning experience! Were they published in several volumes?

Ken: The first two volumes were published by Passage Press, which was a very early presence in the publication of Jyotish here in the United States. The company went out of business before the third volume could be published, though I am told that it was eventually published in India.

Juliana: Did you get to meet and spend time with Bepin Behari too?

Ken: Yes, we finally met when he was the special guest for an ACVA conference in San Diego, in the autumn of 1997.

Juliana: Were Bepin and David instrumental in developing your interest in mythic astrology and the nakshatras?

Ken: Yes, it was through Bepin and David that I was first introduced to the nakshatras, which have continued to be one of my greatest passions in our art, as well as the subject of one of my books, Mansions of the Moon.

I had already been investigating the connections between astrology and mythology. My first book, Mythic Astrology, which was co-authored with Ariel Guttman, examined the subject from the viewpoint of Western astrology. But despite all the richness which lies in that tradition, I found myself wanting more.

The meanings of the planets as we have them in Greek were borrowed from the Babylonians; someone, at some time, established a connection between, for example, the Babylonian god Marduk and the Greek Zeus, or the Babylonian Ishtar and Greek Aphrodite. I was still in search of an astrological language which arose organically out of the deep ocean of myth � and I am defining the word �myth� not in its common usage as �an untrue story,� but as Joseph Campbell defined it, �a higher truth.�

And it was through the nakshatras that I discovered that authentic language of myth, one which was redolent of magic and mystery, for I soon discovered how the nakshatras manifest themselves in such mystical and dreamlike ways in one�s birth chart, as if they were the poetry of the soul.

Juliana: You�ve captured authentic language, magic, mystery, dreamlike vision and soul�s poetry all in one! Please say more.

Ken: It was David who first guided me to the Vedic deities who rule the nakshatras � which is to say, to the idea that the meanings of the nakshatras are directly based upon the character of the deities who rule them. And this opened up to me a whole new world: the poetry of the Rig Veda and the Atharva Veda, the oldest texts in any Indo-European language. I was fascinated. This awakening all took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But it stuck with me � so much so that in 2006 I went back to school for a Master�s Degree in Eastern Studies at St. John�s College, majoring in Sanskrit. Thanks to the friendship of that extraordinary astrological historian Demetra George, I got my hands on an early, previously untranslated nakshatra text. When I took it to my Sanskrit professor and asked if I could translate a few chapters as part of my study program, I expected him to rage at me for wasting my time with a �discredited pseudo-science� like astrology. Instead, he barely looked up from his desk as he said, �Sure, go ahead.�

Juliana: What came from that research?

Ken: The results were recently published in Saptarishis Astrology (The Legend of the Southern Cross: Early Writings on the Nakshatras from the avadana). I have now collected a fairly large number of untranslated works, from Minaraja�s enormous (over a thousand pages long) Vrddha Yavanajataka of 350 CE to works on horary astrology by the Rajput warrior king Bhojaraja, to an extremely rare and early work called the Prasnavidya by one Badarayana, of which only one manuscript copy exists in the world. I have no idea how many years the gods will grant me, or how much I will be able to translate in the time left to me, but the recovery of previously unknown Jyotish works has now become another passion.

Juliana: You�ve been living for part of the year in Guatemala recently. That sounds dreamy.

Ken: I think that for me the underlying life passion � the real heart of the matter if you will � is myth and magic, the idea of life lived as poetry of the heart, as a waking dream, as a personal mythic quest. That was why I spent much of the last few years in a remote town in the mountains of Guatemala, living with Maya campesinos who still practice the ancient Mayan calendar as a medicine path, a spiritual path. The calendar governs their spiritual or ritual lives. On certain calendar days, we would go on pilgrimage in the back of a pickup truck, past villages so removed from the modern world that the people spoke no Spanish, only Maya, to isolated mountain shrines, or we would climb the sacred hill at the center of town to make offerings to the gods of time. It was like living inside a myth, which was something I was longing for and something which was conspicuously missing from my workaday Orange County background.

For each day of the calendar there were stories, prayers, ceremonies and poems. My life among the Maya sparked three books: Jaguar Wisdom, which is an introduction to the calendar in general; Mayan Calendar Astrology, which is precisely what the title says; and Jaguar Medicine, which is a survey of folk healing in the Maya mountains.

Juliana: What are you working on now?

Ken: I continue to seek the same kind of magical world view in Jyotish that I experienced among the Maya. When I began to collect untranslated manuscripts, I found myself in possession of a fair number of works on Prasna. Even some of the most important texts have never been translated. As I pored over them with my Sanskrit dictionary in hand, I realized that I understood very little of what was going on. That was what led me to the Prasna Marga, one of the few major works on Indian horary astrology which can be found in a bilingual edition, much thanks to the scholarship of B. V. Raman. And that has led me to my current project � attempting to write an introduction to the art of Kerala Prasna for Western jyotishis and students.

Juliana: It sounds like deeply tapping into a supernatural world.

Ken: Yes, that�s what it�s all about for me. In India, there are elaborate rituals which accompany Kerala Prasna � chants, songs, prayers. An eight-year-old child selects the Arudha Lagna at random by placing a golden coin somewhere on the horoscope diagram. In studying Kerala Prasna, I often come across material about reading omens, installing temple deities, pretas and pisacas and other topics which � although absolutely fascinating in their own right � are unlikely to be used by me in a practice in the Western world.

Juliana: How do you render this information to make it more palatable to modern Western taste?

Ken: A jyotishi from Sonoma is unlikely to encounter an elephant on the way to the office, and the body language of 17th century India is quite different from that of my own contemporaries in the Western world. But what I think the old sages were trying to say � what is universal rather than specific � is that astrology is much more than just a �science� comprised of rules and regulations to be carefully memorized. By insisting that we ought to be aware of omens, body language, and even breathing, as well as of the horoscope, the old masters of Kerala Prasna are telling us that we ought to cultivate total awareness. Rather than get lost in the details of the horoscope, we ought to seek for a field of consciousness which encompasses every cloud in the sky, every song of a bird, the posture of the human individual who sits across from us, even the very breath in our nostrils, as well as (of course) the portrait of the sky above as embodied in the chart. We are being asked to go beyond mere �science� into a realm of 360-degree awareness which recognizes no limits to the totality of the moment. And that is magical.

Juliana: You recently started a popular Jyotish page on Facebook called �Jyotish Currents.�

Ken: Yes, that�s right. Jyotish Currents was the name of a column that Dennis Flaherty and I co-authored for The Mountain Astrologer (TMA). Tem Tarriktar of TMA was kind enough to let me use the name. My basic aim here is to promote open, courteous discussion on all topics relating to Jyotish. I am not acting as the advocate of any particular astrologer, any particular guru, or any particular point of view. The goal is to keep things as open as possible.

Juliana: Are you doing professional consultations now?

Ken: Definitely. I feel that it�s very important to keep counseling, keep working with people. I can�t remember how often I have come across absolutely brilliant astrologers who were intimately familiar with countless techniques � and capable of working out the most complex formulas in their heads. But they sometimes had difficulty applying their amazing technical knowledge to authentic life situations because they seldom worked with real people.

Juliana: Seems like it would provide a nice balance for writing work.

Ken: And it is especially relevant for scholarly types � folks with a really big Mercury factor. You have to stay connected with life, in all its infinite, imperfect, and thoroughly human diversity. And the only way you can get there is to keep reading charts, keep working with people.

Juliana: In your consultations, do you like to work with planetary remedies (upayes) as well?

Ken: Yes, planetary remedies fascinate me most in my practice these days. I am not sure it is helpful to the client to sugar coat the realities of life, and try to pretend that something like a Saturn-Rahu period is going to be a joyful case of �Mr. Happy Meets Mr. Wonderful.� This is the outlook I encounter more and more often among Western astrologers, but I am not convinced that we serve the client by pretending that life is going to be a big bowl of cherries. Every now and then there is a taste of vinegar. But it is equally unhelpful to predict death, disaster, and other kinds of misfortunes, to make pronouncements like: �Oh gosh, Rahu�s in the 12th and Saturn rules the 9th, so get ready to say goodbye to your ailing dad.� That doesn�t really serve the client either. The planetary remedies, however, are helpful. That is what they�re designed for � to help us sail through the storms and the shifting tides of the cosmos with grace and balance, with clarity and confidence.

Juliana: Which remedies do you find most useful?

Ken: I tend to work with a fair number of clients who are interested in Jyotish but not necessarily Hindu in terms of religion or culture. They have trouble pronouncing the mantras and are entirely clueless as to the deities worshiped in pujas. For these folks, planetary remedies based on changes in lifestyle seem to be the most relevant and the most effective. My real mentor in such practices has been a Western astrologer, Marsilio Ficino. He lived during the Italian Renaissance and was the personal physician to Lorenzo di Medici. All his astrological work focuses on remedies, and it all has to do with shifting your outlook, your patterns of behavior, and your habits, so that you actually become the planet you are trying to strengthen. I was first guided to Ficino through the writings of �astrology-friendly� psychologists like James Hillman and Thomas Moore; when Ariel and I wrote the second volume in the Mythic Astrology series we called it Mythic Astrology Applied, and we focused largely on what one might describe as �planetary remedies,� albeit from a Western point of view.

Juliana: Oh I love that book (Mythic Astrology Applied) and have gotten some great ideas about what I would call �modern upayes� in there, like for instance, listening to �powerful, stately and majestic music� for Jupiter, or simply doing more cooking and gardening for the Moon.

Ken: That�s right! A great deal of what Ficino had to say � his advice about becoming the planet you want to strengthen � works perfectly for Jyotish. For example, he points out that medieval scholars spent a great deal of time sitting in cold rooms, lit only by a weak winter fire, their bones aching, trying to survive on small amounts of food. And he declared, quite rightly, that such people are too influenced by Saturn, and therefore susceptible to Saturnian ailments � which we would probably call vata derangement. Knowing that the Sun ruled a sign opposite to Saturn�s sign, he suggested an infusion of solar substances like cinnamon and honey followed by a refreshing walk in the sunlight. He goes on to say that if you can route your walk through a field of flowers you can add Venus to the Sun, which is even better.

Juliana: I think that makes a lot of sense. Do you like to work with mantras yourself?

Ken: Yes, for myself, and as a student of Sanskrit, I love the mantras. They�re designed to make use of the sacred vibration of sound in order to harmonize the energies of any given planet and elevate those energies to their highest possible level. And there are other methods, too. The whole concept of upayes is virtually endless. Some techniques, such as Vastu and Ayurveda, are a little bit under-utilized and deserve more of our attention. I just mentioned the TMA column that I authored with Dennis Flaherty, and Dennis was instrumental in adapting and re-envisioning the Western technique of astro-cartography through Jyotish (JyotishLocality�). Are things going poorly for you in your present location? Try moving to someplace where you�re basking in the energy of the exalted benefic in your chart.

Juliana: What advice would you give that could be helpful for students of Vedic astrology?

Ken: Don�t try to encompass everything in a single lifetime. The spectrum of Jyotish is so vast and so endless that you will only end up feeling disappointed because there is still one more divisional chart you don�t use, or one more Nadi technique you haven�t mastered, one classical text you still haven�t read. Once you have learned the basics of the art, let your own heart guide you to whatever comes next. When you have established a clear foundation, when you�ve nailed down the essentials of the art, you can build a unique tool kit that works for you. Personally, I am fascinated by nakshatras, mythology, Kerala Prasna, Jaimini� but that�s just me. My point is, everyone is unique. Maybe your own perfect Jyotish tool kit would include Varshaphal, Nadi astrology, and a strong focus on divisional charts. That would be an orientation quite different than my own, but that isn�t the point. The point is, it works for you. You get results, see cosmic connections and can help other people because you�re using the tools that you love, the ones that speak to you most powerfully out of all the techniques available in the vast ocean of Jyotish. And that is what will make you a gifted practitioner � the knowledge that you are following your own unique talent. That is what will make you special.

Juliana: Ken, this has been quite illuminating. We appreciate your taking the time for the interview and also for the great contributions you continue to make to the Jyotish community.

Ken: Thanks, Juliana. My pleasure.

Kenneth Johnson Biography

Kenneth Johnson holds a B.A. in Comparative religions from California State University Fullerton. He obtained his Master of Arts in Eastern Studies (with an emphasis in Classical Sanskrit) from St. John�s College, Santa Fe. A leading figure in the study of myths and archetypes and their importance to the art of astrology, he is the author of numerous books and magazine articles, including the well-known Mythic Astrology series (with Ariel Guttman), and Mansions of the Moon, a study of the lunar zodiac of India. A close student of both Western and Vedic astrology, he has been a frequent contributor to The Mountain Astrologer. Kenneth has spent many months with indigenous Maya teachers in

remote parts of Guatemala; for his writings on the Mayan Calendar, visit www.jaguarwisdom.org. For his astrological work, visit www.kennethjohnsonastrology.com.

Juliana Swanson Biography

Juliana Swanson is a registered nurse (RN), healer, astrologer, mother, and wife. She runs her astrological consulting and holistic healing practices, which combine polarity therapy and rebirthing-breathwork, from her home office on Hawaii's Big Island. In addition, she tutors Vedic astrology students both individually and as an online instructor for the American College of Vedic Astrology and the International Academy of Astrology.

Juliana qualifies as an ACVA and CVA Level II certified Vedic Astrologer, receiving two titles of excellence: the Jyotish Visharada, CVA and the Jyotish Kovid, CVA.

Additionally, in 2012 she was awarded the Jyotish Kovid from the ICAS, Bangalore, India. Juliana may be reached by email at [email protected] or through her website www.AstralHarmony.com.

You may reach Juliana at her Hawaii office at 808-430-5989.



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