The Nine Grahas of Vedic Astrology: An Introduction

Open any Kundli and you will find nine names scattered across its twelve houses. These are the grahas, the nine forces Vedic astrology uses to read a life. Before we look at what makes a planet helpful or harmful, it is worth getting to know each of them.

Starting with the sky itself

At the heart of our Solar System sits the Sun. It is so large that it holds around 740 times more mass than all the planets combined. Around it travel the planets, each spinning on its own axis while following an oval path, or orbit, around the Sun.

It helps to know the difference between a planet and a star. The word planet comes from the Greek planētēs, meaning “wanderer”. Watch the night sky over a few weeks and the planets slowly change position against the background, and at times they vanish from view altogether. The stars, by contrast, keep the same pattern night after night. That fixed backdrop of stars is exactly what Vedic astrology uses to measure where the wandering planets are, through the 27 nakshatras.

Why nine, and why not Uranus, Neptune or Pluto?

The sages who shaped Jyotish worked with the seven bodies they could see with the naked eye: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. The Moon is not a planet in the modern sense, since it circles the Earth, but in astrology it is one of the most important grahas of all.

To these seven they added two more: Rahu and Ketu. These are not physical bodies. They are the two points where the Moon’s path crosses the Sun’s path across the sky, known in English as the Dragon’s Head and the Dragon’s Tail. Eclipses happen near these points, and the ancient sages considered their influence on human life to be immense.

Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were only discovered in 1781, 1846 and 1930, long after the classical texts were written. Traditional Jyotish does not use them, and the charts on this site follow that classical approach.

Meet the nine grahas

Each graha has its own devata (presiding deity), an avatar of Vishnu said to have come from it, and a Mahavidya, one of the ten wisdom goddesses of tantra. Each also rules a Mahadasha: the major planetary period it governs within a full life cycle of 120 years. Your own sequence of Mahadashas begins with the planet that ruled the Moon’s nakshatra when you were born.

The Vimshottari cycle, drawn to scale. Each block is one Mahadasha; the number is its length in years.