7. Objectives of the Research

History and development of Astrology connected with Moon is not fully recognized as academic discipline in a broader sense, in contradistinction to other disciplines like astronomy or geoscience, natural or physical sciences. It is about the last 100 years, an imaginary black line indicating a sort of aversion seems to separate the study of astrology by historians and scholars specializing in other areas of study and scholars appear to feel a very vast divide between astronomy and astrology while the fact remains that the two subjects are very much interconnected.

Earlier Astrology had a respectable status among intellectuals and astrological practices had undergone a remarkable revival at the end of 19^th Century as mentioned by August-Bouche-Leclercq in his reference book ‘L’ Astrologie Grecque. He believed that the study of history of Astrology and its practice was praise-worthy because the great minds of the past had believed in it, and acted on the intellectual edifice built upon such belief in astrological factors. The works and treatises of the bonafide Historians including FRANZ BOLL (1867-1924), GIOVANNI SCHIAPARELLI (1835-1910), WILHELM GUNDEL (1880-1945), OTTO NEUGEBAUER (1899-1990), FRANCESCA ROCHBERG-HALTON, E.F. WEIDNER (1891-1976), Bartel L. VAN DER WAERDEN (1903-1996), LYNN THORNDIKE (1882-1965) have made in-depth analysis and applied such knowledge of ingredients of astrology while reporting and evaluating the existence and progress of ancient civilizations, and they have never failed to give due credit to the role astrology in the study of civilized social existence.

The reputation of astrology in the 20^th Century Astrology was enhanced by the Great US Astrologer Robert Zoller, who started studying the medieval Astrology in the original Latin in the 1970’s. The most important field of achievement for astrology in the 20^th Century was the recognition the acceptance it gained as a tool which could help to assess the human potential and self-actualization in its newly developed branch named Psychological Astrology. However it has to be pointed out that the predictive techniques of Hellenistic astrology and methods of suggesting various remedies as applied medieval astrology are still not widely put to use or experimented with. The people of the 20th century who laid great stress on physical and immediate validation in a rational manner, bitterly criticized the negative attitude of incompetent Astrologers and misuse of the divine science. They were skeptical of the subject because in this field where clever people could interpret anything in any way using the principles laid out in ancient texts as a faced and could easily exploit and manipulate the gullibility and emotional uncertainty arising in the minds of the clients. Many such clients get misdirected and they are never bothered about reasonable proof before they follow such charlatans.

The idea of Post-modern astrology is not simply going back to Willing Lilly, or to Bonatti, or to Vettius Valens, Aryabhatta, Bhaskara, Vaharamihara and others. The proposed objective is to evaluate appropriateness of Astrology in line with the requirements more in line with social and scientific development in the modern age. Presently the people are not averted to the idea of recognizing astrology as a well-established field of study and endeavour extensive public utility. It need not be considered as a rigmarole adopted by a set of fortune tellers who simply encourage the people to approach things attributing the vagaries of fortune merely to the rotation of fate. Astrology, in fact, is an art and science devised to foresee and envisage propitious or inauspicious happenings in the lives of people and places by drawing heavily on the data of planetary movements and variations in the lifestyles and fortunes that were in close correspondence with such variations. The texts recorded such data and a thorough analysis of those data could be used to calculate with reasonable precision as to what we can expect to encounter in future when similar planetary confluences repeated. In fact it is a study in statistics and probability with a lot of vision. The study of ancient texts and analysis of planetary movements bestow peculiar experience in enlightenment, consciousness and selfrealization in human life. And the results of such analysis and estimation can bring in a lot of benefits for the society as a whole. The current trend in the study of researchers and scholars is to collect, collate, document and process more and more information about the Moon, Mars and other Asteroids, putting to use the most sophisticated equipments and research tools and simultaneously using the huge element of data and knowledge already surpassed by the earlier civilizations that shaped our history. The contributory part of Vedas, Upanishads and enlightened postulations of Indian rishis and scholars of the past stand valid and exists as referral texts even in this modern period.