Almagest

The library · The sub periods

The Venus antardasha

a Venus sub-period running inside a larger Vimshottari mahadasha

What the tradition reads

A Venus antardasha carries the sub-period's own flavour within whatever larger mahadasha it falls, its length again a fixed share of Venus's twenty years out of the Vimshottari total of a hundred and twenty. Phaladeepika reads a period coloured by Venus as bringing the materials and facilities for enjoyment and comfort, good vehicles, gems and ornaments, the company of loved ones, and, in a second verse on the same planet, the acquisition of a spouse, jewels, fine clothing, wealth and the comforts of the marriage bed. Venus is the classical significator of love, beauty, marriage and the arts, so jyotish generally reads its sub-periods as the years in which partnership, aesthetic pleasure and the making of beautiful or valuable things move to the front of a life, whatever the surrounding mahadasha is otherwise occupied with. Because Venus is also the significator of pleasure broadly, and not only of romantic partnership, the same period can as easily favour a creative or luxury facing pursuit as a marriage or relationship, and the classical texts read the specific channel as depending on where Venus sits and what it aspects in the birth chart.

The story

Shukra, Venus's Sanskrit name, is told as the guru of the asuras, teacher to the enemies of the gods just as Brihaspati teaches the gods themselves. Wikipedia's account has Shiva blessing Shukra with the Sanjeevini Vidya, the knowledge of raising the dead, after Shukra performed austerities to win it, a power he then used repeatedly to restore the asuras to life. The devas sent Kacha, son of their own guru Brihaspati, to Shukra's hermitage to learn the same secret; when the asuras killed Kacha and mixed his remains into wine that Shukra then drank, Shukra taught him the reviving mantra so Kacha could bring himself back to life from inside his teacher, and Kacha, once restored, used the same knowledge in turn to revive Shukra. Devayani, Shukra's daughter, later cursed Kacha, when he refused her offer of marriage, so that he could never use the mantra for himself, a secret won but never fully his own. A planet credited with restoring life carries naturally into a period read as restorative and pleasurable rather than testing, and Venus's long association with beauty, love and the arts across every later commentary is already present in this oldest of its stories, a teacher who gives, generously and skilfully, whatever is asked.

Written from

Corpus key antardasha:Venus.