Graha maitri kuta

the fifth test of the ashta kuta marriage matching system, friendship of the Moon sign lords

What the tradition reads

Every classical planet stands in one of three fixed relations to every other, friend, enemy or neutral, a permanent table called naisargika maitri that has nothing to do with any single birth chart and everything to do with the planets' own natures. Mars, for instance, counts the Sun, the Moon and Jupiter as friends, and Venus counts Mercury and Saturn, with Mars and Venus themselves neutral to each other. Read for a single chart, this fixed friendship table is used constantly, quite apart from marriage matching, to judge how comfortably a planet sits in the sign of a friendly or an unfriendly lord, one of the basic measures of a planet's strength. Applied to two charts, graha maitri scores the friendship between the lords of the two natives' Moon signs, worth five of the total thirty six points, on a five step scale: the same lord or a mutual friendship scores the full five points, one side calling the other a friend while it is called neutral in return scores four, mutual neutrality scores three, a friend on one side against an enemy on the other scores one, a neutral on one side against an enemy on the other scores half a point, and mutual enmity scores nothing at all. Graha maitri is sometimes confused with the yoni test beside it, but it concerns the two ruling planets' fixed relationship rather than the two natives' own animal natures, and a neutral pairing is correctly scored in the middle of the range rather than assumed friendly simply for not being enemies.

The story

The naisargika maitri table is one of the oldest pieces of technical apparatus in the whole system, appearing in Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra as a fixed grid derived from each planet's own moolatrikona sign, the lords of the second, fourth, fifth, eighth, ninth and twelfth signs from that seat are counted as a planet's natural friends, and the lords of the third, sixth, seventh, tenth and eleventh as its natural enemies, with whatever remains left as neutral. The logic is geometric rather than characterful, friendship and enmity are read off the same houses that describe support and opposition in an ordinary chart, applied once to the planets themselves rather than to any individual's placements. Marriage matching borrows this already ancient grid unchanged, asking only which two lords happen to govern the couple's Moon signs and reading the couple's own compatibility through a table that was built centuries before either of them, or the concept of matching charts for marriage, existed in its current form.

Written from

Corpus key kuta:graha-maitri.