Shasha is one of the five Pancha Mahapurusha yogas, the great-person combinations of jyotisha, and it is the yoga of Saturn. It forms when Saturn occupies its own sign, Capricorn or Aquarius, or its sign of exaltation, Libra, while standing in a kendra, an angular house from the ascendant. The tradition reads Shasha as conferring the Saturnian virtues in strength: endurance, discipline, authority won through labour, command over others and over resources, and a capacity for sustained effort, giving a person of the powerful and self-made type, though the tradition also notes Saturn's harder edge. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the yoga is a defined placement of Saturn in dignity and angularity, one of the five that together mark an exceptional nativity when the planet is strong and unafflicted.
Saturn's exaltation in Libra, a sign ruled by Venus, gives Shasha a mixed classical reception: some commentators stress that Saturn there is strong by dignity but still operating in the house-matters of a planet whose nature is largely foreign to its own, so the yoga's harder discipline and its confer of authority are read as coming at some personal cost, a note the tradition attaches to Shasha more than to the other four. The disagreement over reckoning appears here as well: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra ties the yoga to the ascendant, while Mantreswara in the Phaladeepika extends it to the Moon, and Saturn's association with servants, labourers and the socially marginal in classical significations is sometimes cited by commentators to explain why Shasha, alone among the five, is occasionally read as bestowing power gained through struggle or through people of low station rather than by birthright.