The Rahu dasha

the eighteen year Rahu mahadasha in the Vimshottari sequence

What the tradition reads

Rahu, the north lunar node, governs a period of eighteen years in the Vimshottari cycle, the third longest of the nine after Venus's twenty and Saturn's nineteen. Wikipedia's account of Rahu describes it, together with Ketu, as a "shadow planet" that causes eclipses, allocated the status of a planet by ancient seers despite having no physical existence of its own. The tradition reads a Rahu dasha as unpredictable in a way none of the seven classical planets' periods are. Phaladeepika's harsher reading warns that during Rahu's dasha a person may expect trouble from the sovereign, thieves, poison, fire and weapons, sickness to children, a ruffled mind and loss of relations; the same text allows that when Rahu is associated with a benefic and occupies good houses, its period will instead be auspicious and lift the native to affluence on a par with the king.

The story

Rahu belongs to the story of Svarbhanu, an asura who sat among the devas during the churning of the ocean of milk and drank a share of the amrita, the elixir of immortality, that Mohini, the female avatar of Vishnu, was distributing to the gods. Surya and Chandra noticed him and told Mohini, but by then Svarbhanu had already become immortal; Vishnu, still as Mohini, cut off his head with his discus, the Sudarshana Chakra. Because the asura could no longer die, his severed head lived on as Rahu and his body as Ketu, and the two became enemies of the Sun and Moon who had exposed him. The Navagraha Stotram addresses him in its own verse, calling him, in Vidhyanath Rao and Srinivas Kalyanaraman's translation, one having "half a body, of great bravery... born of Simhika," "the eclipser of the Moon and the Sun." A being with no body of its own, made immortal a moment before it could be kept whole, has always sat oddly among the nine grahas, and the tradition's reading of its long dasha, an appetite that outran the very body meant to hold it, inherits the myth directly.

Written from

Corpus key dasha:Rahu.