Mangala

Mangala, Mars, is the third graha. Its presiding deity is Kartikeya (Skanda), the war-god, its gemstone is red coral, its element is fire, and its Vimshottari period is seven years. In jyotisha Mangala signifies energy, courage, aggression, competition, siblings (especially brothers), and physical drive. It is classed as a natural malefic, capable of cutting and harming as well as protecting. Mangala rules two signs, Mesha (Aries) and Vrishchika (Scorpio), and is exalted in Makara (Capricorn). The tradition pays close attention to an affliction called Mangal dosha or Kuja dosha, in which Mars in certain houses is held to trouble marriage, and which is weighed carefully in match-making. These are the interpretive conventions of jyotisha; the underlying body is the fourth planet from the Sun, whose reddish colour anchors the coral and fire associations.

The nine grahas of jyotisha take their name from the Sanskrit root grah-, to seize or grasp, a name that reflects the class's defining trait, a grip on the nativity, rather than physical status as a body; Mangala is unambiguously a planet in the modern sense, but two of his eight companions, Rahu and Ketu, are calculated points rather than bodies and belong to the same class purely by that grip. Mars's place in the ninefold system reached Sanskrit astrology from Greek horoscopy through the Yavanajataka, a versification of a Greek text of roughly the second to fourth centuries CE, which brought the apparatus of dignity and exaltation to astronomical knowledge India already possessed. The gemstone and Vimshottari period length now attached to Mangala belong to a later layer, codified in compilations such as the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra of roughly the seventh or eighth century CE.

Sources Brihat Parashara Hora ShastraSage Parashara (attributed) with Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical LiteratureDavid Pingree, The Yavanajataka of SphujidhvajaDavid Pingree

A graha is not read in isolation but through the several tables that make up a Panchanga and a chart. It rules Tuesday in the seven-day week, which in the Indian tradition as in the European one is named for the seven visible grahas in the order of the planetary hours. It holds 7 years of the Vimshottari dasha cycle, and it is lord of three of the twenty-seven nakshatras, Mrigashira, Chitra and Dhanishta, spaced nine apart so that the nine grahas cover the twenty-seven exactly three times over.

The Vimshottari dasha system divides a notional lifetime of 120 years among the nine grahas in a fixed order, Ketu, Venus, Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury, with fixed lengths that sum to exactly 120. Which period a person begins life in is determined by the nakshatra the Moon occupied at birth, and how far through that period, by how far through the nakshatra the Moon had travelled.

In the scheme of dignities it is exalted in Capricorn and in its fall in Cancer, and dignity is what the classical rules for strength are built on, since a graha in its own sign or its exaltation is read as able to act and one in its fall as constrained.

Mars is one of the five star planets, and with the other four it can form a great-person combination, one of the Pancha Mahapurusha yogas, when it stands in its own sign or its exaltation while occupying an angle. That class is restricted to the five and excludes both luminaries and both nodes, which is one of the places where the system's internal categories show clearly.