Adhi

Adhi Yoga is formed when benefic planets occupy the sixth, seventh and eighth places counted from the Moon. It is read for prosperity, leadership, good health and a settled and respected position, and the classical texts grade the result according to how many of the three places are occupied and how strong the benefics are, with the fullest form giving the most. The construction is unusual in taking its houses from the Moon rather than from the Ascendant, which is characteristic of a whole family of chandra or lunar yogas in which the Moon is treated as a second Ascendant; that practice is one of the distinctive features of Jyotisha and has no close western parallel. The three places concerned, the sixth, seventh and eighth from the Moon, are otherwise mostly read unfavourably, which makes the yoga a case of benefics redeeming difficult ground.

Because the sixth, seventh and eighth houses from any reference point are largely read as difficult ground, commentators on Adhi Yoga have long debated an edge case the base definition leaves open: what happens when one of the qualifying benefics is itself the classical lord of a malefic house, the sixth, eighth or twelfth, counted from the Ascendant rather than from the Moon. Some later authorities hold that such a planet, though benefic by nature, imports a measure of its house-lordship's difficulty into the yoga's promised ease, while others hold that Adhi Yoga's Moon-based reckoning is self-contained and unaffected by Ascendant-based house lordship. No resolution commands universal assent, and the disagreement is a useful illustration of a broader tension in Jyotisha between a planet's fixed natural character and the situational character it takes on as the lord of a particular house in a particular chart.

Adhi Yoga requires Mercury, Jupiter and Venus, the three natural benefics, to occupy the sixth, seventh and eighth houses counted from the Moon. It is worth pausing on how odd that specification is, because it cuts against two of the system's general rules at once.

The sixth and eighth are dusthanas, houses the tradition otherwise treats as places of difficulty where a planet's significations suffer. Adhi Yoga nonetheless wants benefics there. The usual explanation offered is that the three houses together form the arc opposite the Moon, so that the combination describes the Moon as supported from across the chart rather than as afflicted from bad houses, and that a benefic in a difficult house acts on the difficulty rather than being consumed by it.

Whether all three planets are required, or whether one or two produce a partial result, is disputed. Most sources allow a graded outcome and rank the result by how many of the three participate and how strong each is.

The significations attributed to it are leadership, standing and the command of others, and the older texts are unusually specific about rank.

The atlas records the specification and the dispute. Nothing here bears on any individual.