One of the sociological goals of astrology is to warn and prepare mankind well in advance about the outbreak of a calamity or an epidemic of a killer variety. The impact and spread of these calamities are felt globally throwing up new challenges to investigative astrology. The Wall Street impact of a global financial melt down that started last year when Mercury went into retrogression in Virgo is a classic example of how an event outside one’s country can cascade into tsunamic proportions and drown other countries too, where the event originally did not take place.

Today we in India are in the brink of braving another global calamity in the form of swine flu epidemic. The tasks of astrology are therefore always there for us to be on the alert all the time. Should astrology be a mute science unable to predict this outbreak before hand? No it should not be and it cannot be. The ancient masters have given us a vast literature in Samhitas that cover everything under the sun. Thinking on the lines of Medhini Jyothisha, we are not in paucity of tools of astrology to predict the kind of epidemic that we are now faced with. This article precisely deals with such tools that are helpful in predicting the calamities of the kind of swine flu outbreak.

To begin with, we have to see the current year globally when the sun entered zero degrees Aries, the point where it was at the time the Chathur Mahayuga started. The celestial map when sun entered Aries on 13-04-2009 (IST 12.47 am, 14-04-2009) is given below.



Sun                      0 Ar 00' 20.99"                 Aswi      1
Moon                  18 Sc 55' 09.41"               Jye          1
Mars                   29 Aq 12' 26.80"               PBha     3
Mercury              14 Ar 14' 02.72"                 Bhar     1
Jupiter                27 Cp 22' 56.09"                Dhan     2
Venus (R)          5 Pi 31' 58.58"                    UBha     1
Saturn (R)       21 Le 50' 40.30"                 PPha     3
Rahu               11 Cp 31' 42.20"                 Srav     1
Ketu                11 Cn 31' 42.20"                  Push     3