The Rahu antardasha

the Rahu antardasha, a sub-period of Rahu falling within any mahadasha of the Vimshottari sequence

What the tradition reads

Every mahadasha in the Vimshottari sequence divides into nine antardashas, one for each graha, each lasting a length proportional to that planet's own share of the hundred and twenty year cycle, so the Rahu antardasha, drawn from Rahu's own eighteen years, runs longer inside most mahadashas than all but a Saturn or Venus antardasha would. Phaladeepika's rule for the sub-periods states that a planet's dasha effects recur again in its bhukti and antara, so a Rahu antardasha is read through the same lens as a Rahu mahadasha at smaller scale, trouble from those in authority, from thieves, poison, fire and weapons where Rahu is poorly placed or badly disposed, and a lift toward real affluence where it keeps company with benefic planets and stands in strong houses instead. Because a shadow point has no dasha of its own kind of steady, settled growth to offer even at full length, its antardasha is read as unpredictable in the same way its mahadasha is, an interruption that can bend whatever mahadasha it falls inside toward the unfamiliar, the foreign or the unconventional, for better or worse depending on the rest of the chart.

The story

Rahu is the head of Svarbhanu, the asura who disguised himself among the gods to steal a taste of the nectar of immortality and was beheaded by Vishnu's discus before he could swallow it, so that the head lives on forever hungry, forever chasing the Sun and Moon that exposed him, said to swallow them briefly at an eclipse before they slip back out through his severed throat. An antardasha, a shorter period that enters and then leaves a longer mahadasha governed by someone else, mirrors this hunger that can never be satisfied and never settles anywhere for long: Rahu's antardasha is read as exactly this kind of visit, an appetite for what lies outside the mahadasha's own usual territory that seizes its moment inside the larger period and then passes on, still unsatisfied, to whichever planet's antardasha follows it.

Written from

Corpus key antardasha:Rahu.