The Nine Grahas

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Maitreya has just been told what the grahas are. His next question is the obvious one: fine — but who are they?

Parashara answers in a way that is easy to read past. Verses 2 to 9 sound like housekeeping. He distinguishes the fixed stars from the bodies that move through the asterisms; he notes that the zodiac has twenty-seven asterisms beginning from Aśvinī and twelve signs beginning from Aries; he says planetary positions should be taken by Dṛkgaṇita, calculation that agrees with observation.

That last point is worth pausing on. Parashara is telling you to use the method that matches the sky. Not the traditional figure, not the convenient one — the one that is observationally right. It is a small remark and a rather modern attitude, and you will meet its consequences in Week 2 when you look at what a chart’s numbers actually depend on.

The nine

Then verse 10, which simply names them:

Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Rahu, Ketu.

Learn that order. Not a different one — that one. Parashara reuses it for the rest of the book, and later chapters will hand you a list of nine values with no labels attached and expect you to know which is which.

Two of the nine are not physical bodies at all. Rahu and Ketu are the lunar nodes, the two points where the Moon’s path crosses the Sun’s — the points where eclipses happen. They have no disc to see. Parashara counts them among the grahas anyway, and treats them throughout as capable of delivering results in their own right.

The division that runs through everything

Verse 11 is eleven verses in and is the most consequential thing you will read this week:

Among these planets, the Sun, Saturn, Mars, decreasing Moon, Rahu and Ketu are malefics, and the remaining — full Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus — are benefics. Mercury, however, becomes malefic if he is joined with a malefic.

Read it again, slowly. Two of the nine are given with conditions attached, and the conditions are of two entirely different kinds.

The Moon depends on its own state. A waxing Moon is benefic; a waning Moon is malefic. Nothing about the rest of the chart changes that — it is a fact about where the Moon is relative to the Sun, and it travels with the Moon.

Mercury depends on its company. Alone, Mercury is benefic. Joined by a malefic, Mercury becomes malefic. The same Mercury, in the same sign, at the same degree, classifies differently depending on who else is standing there.

That distinction — a planet’s own condition versus its relationships — is one of the organising contrasts of the whole book. You will meet it again in this very week, when dignity turns out to be about a planet’s own position and planetary relationships turn out to be about how planets regard each other. Two different questions, asked separately, answered separately, and combined only later and carefully.

What “malefic” actually means

Here is the thing most likely to go wrong in your head over the next few weeks, so let us deal with it now.

Malefic does not mean bad. Benefic does not mean good.

They describe how a graha operates. Benefics expand, soften, sustain, protect and grant. Malefics separate, restrict, harden, delay and force effort. Both descriptions are morally neutral, and either can be exactly what a situation requires.

A life with no malefic influence at all would not be a charmed life; it would be a life with nothing to push against. Saturn delays things — which is precisely how Saturn produces the kind of achievement that only comes from sustained difficulty. Mars separates — which is how surgery works, and courage, and leaving a situation you should leave.

And the classification is only the first layer. By Week 6 you will find that Saturn is one of the very best things that can happen to a Taurus ascendant, because of what it rules there. The natural nature never goes away, but it stops being the whole story quite quickly.

So resist the arithmetic. Counting your benefics against your malefics is not a technique, it is not in BPHS, and it will not tell you anything about a life.

Where this is going

You now have the cast, and you know how each member of it acts. What you do not yet know is who each of them is — what the Sun signifies as against the Moon, why Jupiter is the one who confers knowledge, what Mars is doing in the list at all.

Verse 12 begins to answer that, and it is the next unit. Parashara does it in one dense sweep: the Sun is the soul, the Moon the mind, Mars strength, Mercury speech, Jupiter knowledge and happiness. Five clauses, and a surprising amount of the rest of Jyotish falls out of them.