Welcome
Welcome to the website of Dr Martin Gansten. In this section you will find information about my academic research and output. My main areas of interest are, on the one hand, intersections between the history of science and the history of religion, particularly the intercultural transmission and development of horoscopic astrology from the Hellenistic period up to the 19th century; and on the other, South Asian history and culture, classical and modern Hinduism, and Sanskrit philology. Several of these topics come together in my recent edition/translation of The Jewel of Annual Astrology, an encyclopaedic seventeenth-century work on Tājika (Sanskritized Perso-Arabic) astrology available under Open Access from the Brill website.
If you are looking for non-academic information about astrology, it may be found here. If you wish to contact me, you are welcome to do so here.
The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues), and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question.’ To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge – to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour – this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.
– C. S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters