The Navagraha

The nine are Surya the sun, Chandra the moon, Mangala for Mars, Budha for Mercury, Brihaspati or Guru for Jupiter, Shukra for Venus, Shani for Saturn, and then Rahu and Ketu. Seven of them are visible bodies. Rahu and Ketu are not bodies at all: they are the two points at which the path of the moon crosses the ecliptic, the nodes, and eclipses happen when a luminary is near one of them. Indian tradition personified those points as the head and the body of a figure severed while drinking the stolen nectar of immortality, who pursues and swallows the sun and the moon and cannot hold either of them.

The word usually translated as planet is graha, from the root grah, to seize or take hold. That is a much better description of the working idea than planet is. A graha takes hold of a life for a period through the dasha system, exercises its character while it holds, and then releases it, and the practical business of Indian astrology is largely a matter of which graha is holding a person and for how long. Sanskrit forms the words for the eclipse-seizure and for possession from the same root, which is not a coincidence.

Counting the two nodes among the nine is therefore consistent rather than odd. What matters is not whether a thing is a body but whether it takes hold.

Temples across South India set the nine in a single shrine within the compound, usually on a raised platform in the first enclosure. The standard arrangement puts Surya at the centre on a lotus plinth with the other eight around him in fixed positions, and it is a rule of the arrangement that no two of them face each other, each looking outward or in a prescribed direction so that their glances do not meet. The architectural and iconographic manuals prescribe the placement, the mounts and the attributes, and the arrangement is stable enough that a visitor can read it in an unfamiliar temple without asking.

The purpose is remedial. A worshipper who has been told that a particular graha is unfavourably placed circumambulates the platform and offers to that one, with a specified grain, cloth colour, flower, oil lamp and number of circuits attached to each. The nine grains offered together, navadhanya, and the nine coloured cloths give the practice its distinctive look.

The Kumbakonam region of Tamil Nadu takes this further by distributing the nine across nine separate temples in the surrounding countryside, one for each graha, so that the remedial visit becomes a circuit of villages rather than a walk around a platform. Suryanar Kovil, the temple of the sun, is the anchor of that circuit and one of the very few major South Indian temples where a graha is the principal deity rather than an attendant on one.