Maraka Planets for Each Lagna: The 2nd and 7th House Lords

Marak Grah Kya Hota Hai (मारक ग्रह)

Maraka is a Sanskrit word for that which strikes or kills, and in Parashari jyotish it names two houses, the 2nd and the 7th, and the grahas that rule them. The reasoning the classical texts give is a matter of counting. The 3rd and the 8th are taken as the houses of longevity, and a house twelfth from another is read as its loss. Counted from the 3rd, the 2nd is the twelfth house, and counted from the 8th, the 7th is. The lords of the two houses are then called maraka grahas.

The name sounds like a verdict, and it is not one. The site’s house table puts it plainly: the label is used only in longevity calculation and does not make the 2nd or the 7th inauspicious in ordinary reading. The 2nd stays the house of family, speech and savings, and the 7th the house of partnership, whichever graha owns them. This page lists the maraka lords for each lagna and what else each of them rules. It does not time anything, and it cannot.

Maraka Planets for All 12 Lagnas

Lordship here is whole-sign: the sign on the 2nd or 7th house is counted from the lagna sign, and its lord is the single Parashari sign lord. The houses columns give every house that graha owns for that lagna, so a maraka lord that also rules a trine or an angle shows it at once. If you do not know your lagna, the ascendant calculator gives it from the birth date, time and place.

Where One Graha Owns Both Maraka Houses

For two lagnas a single graha rules both the 2nd and the 7th: Venus for Aries and Mars for Libra. It happens because the two signs that graha owns sit exactly five signs apart, and for these two lagnas they fall on the 2nd and the 7th. In each case the graha owns nothing else, so its whole lordship for that lagna is the maraka pair. Every other lagna has two different maraka lords.

Only one lagna has its own lord among the maraka lords: Capricorn, whose lord Saturn also rules Aquarius on the 2nd. That is the only row in which the graha the chart is read through first, the lagna lord, carries the maraka label at all.

Maraka Lords That Also Own a Trine, an Angle or a Dusthana

Because each of the five star grahas owns two signs, most maraka lords carry a second house, and the second house changes how the lordship is weighed. The table above shows them all; three patterns stand out.

• A 2nd lord that also owns a trine (5th or 9th): Mercury for Taurus (2nd, 5th), Venus for Virgo (2nd, 9th), Jupiter for Scorpio (2nd, 5th) and Mars for Pisces (2nd, 9th). In Parashari functional lordship the trine is the stronger claim.
• A 7th lord that also owns a dusthana (6th, 8th or 12th): Mars for Taurus (7th, 12th), Saturn for Cancer (7th, 8th), Saturn for Leo (6th, 7th) and Venus for Scorpio (7th, 12th). No 2nd lord owns a dusthana for any lagna.
• A 7th lord that owns two angles: Jupiter for Gemini, Jupiter for Virgo, Mercury for Sagittarius and Mercury for Pisces, exactly the four dual lagnas. Jupiter and Mercury are both natural benefics, so the same four cells also fall under kendradhipati dosha, a benefic owning angles, which has its own table.

The luminaries own one sign each, so where one of them is a maraka lord the role is its entire lordship: the Moon for Gemini, the Sun for Cancer, the Moon for Capricorn and the Sun for Aquarius. Rahu and Ketu own no sign in this scheme and never appear as maraka lords in the table, although some practice reads them through the lord of the sign they occupy.

Which Grahas Are Maraka Lords Most Often

Counting each graha once per lagna, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn are each a maraka lord for four of the twelve lagnas, Mars and Venus for three, and the Sun and the Moon for two each. Mars and Venus come out one short of the other star grahas because each takes both maraka houses at once for one lagna. The count is a property of the sign table, not of people: it says nothing about how many charts have any of these lagnas.

• The Sun: Cancer and Aquarius
• The Moon: Gemini and Capricorn
• Mars: Taurus, Libra and Pisces
• Mercury: Taurus, Leo, Sagittarius and Pisces
• Jupiter: Gemini, Virgo, Scorpio and Aquarius
• Venus: Aries, Virgo and Scorpio
• Saturn: Cancer, Leo, Sagittarius and Capricorn

What Else the Texts Count as Maraka

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra does not stop at the two lords. Its chapter on marakas also names grahas occupying the 2nd and the 7th and grahas joined with the maraka lords, and it ties the whole question to a prior estimate of the length of life drawn from other rules. None of that can be read off a table by lagna; it needs a full chart. The house pages for the 2nd house and the 7th house cover what the two houses signify in ordinary reading, and the guide to the twelve houses places them among the rest. Another lordship label read lagna by lagna, the badhaka or obstructing house, is tabulated on the badhakesh page; for the dual lagnas it falls on the same 7th.

What This Page Does Not Do

It does not predict a death, a danger or an illness, for you or anyone else, and it does not treat a maraka dasha or a maraka transit as one. No chart reading can do that responsibly, and this site will not attempt it. It offers no upay for a maraka graha either, because there is nothing to repair: owning the 2nd or the 7th is a role in one calculation, not a fault in a chart. A question about your health belongs with a doctor.

In Hindi: मारक ग्रह: हर लग्न के दूसरे और सातवें भाव के स्वामी.