Sidereal Lunar Mansions using the Tropical Zodiac

I have been listening to Shuly Rose talk about the sidereal lunar mansions for the past couple years of our friendship. And she has now begun releasing this work to the public, so I think it's time I put this also in public.

This is the tool I needed to get started working with the mansions.

I hope it helps you too.

Shuly is offering an incredibly generous treasure trove – the culmination of years of experiential practice and research on the mansions.

Although I use the tropical zodiac, she sold me on using sidereal just for lunar mansion reckoning.

Shuly’s written two things on the ‘tropical or sidereal' question: first, a more technical article on the history of how we (humanity, that is) reckon the mansions, and a second, juicy one on how she received a dream from Selene which led her down this path. Those are here. Her combination of reverent gnosis-steeped devotion, academic rigor, and her ability to synthesize diverse strains of history make her one I’d trust with my most treasured students.

I see the tropical zodiac as a solar zodiac – it follows not just the path, but the pattern of the sun. It is fixed – it does not change with the times, but transposes its stalwart overlay, derived from philosophical, symbolic premise, onto the mutable, material, lunar reality. Sidereal does the same thing, actually, but its own philosophical premise prioritizes, more than tropical, shifting with the changing background of fixed stars as we move through precession (although it is still not a 1 to 1 match with the true state of things). Because of this, it seems more lunar, in nature to me, while the tropical zodiac is solar. Astrologer Dayna Lynn Nuckols has pointed this out at great length in her work.

It makes sense, to me, to use a lunar zodiac for matters intimate to the moon, so intimate as her visits to her 28 lovers.

while it might seem counter-intuitive to mix two zodiacs, mixed lunisolar calendars are common. I see this as the astrological equivilant to that lunar & solar form of time reckoning.

For more on why I think astrology is able to deal with this level of structural flexibility, you should read my piece on the omen model, on how astrology works.

All that sweet ideology in place, I still struggled to get it through my head - I had to think it through fresh each time - 'ok, we want the sidereal degrees, translated into the tropical zodiac' I'm not a strong visualizer - a wordcel, not a shaperotater - ask me about how ADHD affects working memory. I needed a chart, but I couldn't find a place that offered the precise tropical degrees of the sidereally-reckoned mansions up-to-date for the current year. Most seem to approximate, but I since I was getting so into the 'physical accuracy' of it all, I thought - might as well go all the way.

I wanted to know exactly where the manazil were, and I wanted the reckoning to update without having to redo the math every year.

So I decided to make a chart that gives us the up-to-the-year tropical degrees of the sidereal lunar mansions.

If you care about the nitty gritty of how i did this, tell me on social media, and maybe I'll write another post. I used javascript, it was a Whole Thing.

Precession means our start-point for the 1st mansion is forever travelling backwards, at a rate of about 50.29 arcseconds per year. So I set this chart to be able to change every year. Here is 2024's edition, using Fagan Allen as the sidereal ayanamsa we reckon from.

I’m also including a link to the google sheet itself. Make a copy of the sheet and do what you will with it. There’s an instruction page! You can change the year! You can even change the ayanamsa, if you’re brave enough! Do not fw the red cells, unless it’s to change the ayanamsa. You will break it : ) The instructions for updating your ayanamsa are on the second sheet, if you’re not a fagan-allen girly.

With Shuly on the case, I predict there will be an increased interest in doing the mansions this way.

Love and Lunisolar Light,

Hawk