Shukra

Shukra, Venus, is the sixth graha, the second benefic of the system, named for Shukracharya, the guru of the asuras, who is its presiding deity. Its gemstone is the diamond, its element is water, and its Vimshottari period is twenty years, the longest of the nine. In jyotisha Shukra signifies love, marriage, beauty, art, pleasure, comfort, and refinement. It is classed as a benefic and is the natural significator of the spouse, particularly the wife, and of the sensual and aesthetic goods of life. Shukra rules two signs, Vrishabha (Taurus) and Tula (Libra), and is exalted in Meena (Pisces). Its condition is weighed for questions of relationship, wealth, and enjoyment. These are the interpretive conventions of jyotisha; the underlying body is the second planet, the brilliant morning and evening star long linked with beauty across many traditions.

Graha is from the Sanskrit root grah-, to seize or grasp, a name that defines the nine grahas by their hold on a nativity rather than by physical existence, broad enough to cover Rahu and Ketu, calculated points and not bodies, within the same class as Shukra, which plainly is one. Venus's inclusion among the seven classical grahas reached Sanskrit astrology from Greek horoscopy through the Yavanajataka, a Sanskrit versification of a Greek astrological text of roughly the second to fourth centuries CE, which carried the apparatus of dignity and exaltation to bodies already long known to Indian astronomy. The love, beauty and refinement readings attached to Shukra, along with the twenty-year Vimshottari period, the longest of the nine, belong to a later layer, credited to 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 Friday 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 20 years of the Vimshottari dasha cycle, and it is lord of three of the twenty-seven nakshatras, Bharani, Purva Phalguni and Purva Ashadha, 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 Pisces and in its fall in Virgo, 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.

Venus holds the longest of the nine dasha periods at twenty years, a sixth of the whole 120-year cycle. The lengths are not proportional to any astronomical quantity and are simply given by the tradition, which is one of several places where the Vimshottari scheme is a convention rather than a computation from the sky.