Planet Friendship Table: The Graha Maitri Chart

The Natural Friendship Grid (ग्रह मैत्री चक्र)

Naisargika maitri, the natural friendship of the grahas, is a fixed table: for each graha it sorts the others into friends, neutrals and enemies. Grahon ki mitrata, the friendship of the planets, is the everyday Hindi name for it, and a planet friendship chart is the same table drawn as a grid. The version below is the one the site’s Navagraha entries carry, laid out as a grid so that each pair can be read in both directions at once.

Read across. Each row is one graha’s list, and each cell gives where that list puts the graha at the top of the column. The seven rows from the Sun to Saturn each sort exactly the other six grahas; none of them mentions Rahu or Ketu, which is why the grid has seven columns and not nine. The two node rows each sort all seven grahas, and neither names the other node.

Legend: F = friend, N = neutral, E = enemy, · = the graha itself. The Moon’s row has no E at all: its enemies entry reads “None — the Moon has no natural enemy”.

Six Mutual Friendships and Two Mutual Enmities

Seven grahas make 21 pairs. In six of them, each list names the other a friend: Sun–Moon, Sun–Mars, Sun–Jupiter, Mars–Jupiter, Mercury–Venus and Venus–Saturn. In two, each names the other an enemy, and both pairs include the Sun: Sun–Venus and Sun–Saturn. Two more are neutral both ways, Mars–Venus and Jupiter–Saturn. That accounts for 10 pairs. The remaining 11, more than half, are one-sided: the two rows give different answers about the same pair.

The Eleven One-Sided Pairs

Only one pair splits all the way from friend to enemy. The Moon’s list puts Mercury among its friends, while Mercury’s list puts the Moon among its enemies. The other ten disagree by one step: four pair a friend with a neutral, and six pair an enemy with a neutral. Five of the eleven involve the Moon, and that follows from its row: it lists four grahas as neutral, and all four of their rows list the Moon as a friend or an enemy. The fifth is the Mercury split.

Rows and Columns Count Differently

Totalled over the seven rows, the grid holds 17 friend entries, 14 neutral and 11 enemy, out of 42. By rows, the Sun, Mars and Jupiter each list three friends, the most any row has. The Moon’s is the only row with no enemy, and Saturn’s, with three, has the most.

The columns give a second view: how the other lists place a graha. The Sun appears as a friend in four of the six other rows, more than anyone; Saturn in just one, Venus’s. Jupiter is the one graha that no row lists as an enemy. The Moon, which lists no enemy of its own, is listed as one by three rows: Mercury’s, Venus’s and Saturn’s. Rows and columns therefore answer different questions, and a page that quotes only one direction of a pair is quoting half the table.

Rahu and Ketu: Rows With No Column

The node rows are the bottom two lines of the grid. They agree on five grahas: both list the Sun and the Moon as enemies, Venus and Saturn as friends and Jupiter as neutral. They part on two. Rahu’s row has Mars as an enemy and Mercury as a friend; Ketu’s has Mars as a friend and Mercury as neutral.

What the planet table does not supply is the other direction. No row of the seven grahas mentions either node, so there is no entry for how, say, the Sun’s list places Rahu. This page leaves that cell empty rather than filling it with “neutral”, which would be an entry the table never made. The Rahu and Ketu pages carry the node rows as written.

Friendly, Neutral and Enemy Signs for Each Graha

The table reaches the signs through their lords. Each of the twelve signs has one ruler in the site’s sign data, so a graha’s list of friends turns into a list of friends’ signs. The planet-in-sign pages use exactly this. When the site grades a placement such as Mercury in Cancer, it checks exaltation first, then debilitation, then own sign; only if none applies does it call the sign a friend’s, an enemy’s or a neutral sign, and it decides that from the visiting graha’s row alone, not from the host’s view of the guest.

Because the Moon’s row has no enemies, the Moon has no enemy’s sign at all, and eight of its twelve signs come out neutral. Mercury has a single enemy’s sign, Cancer, the Moon’s. The Sun, Jupiter and Saturn have four enemy’s signs each, the most for any of the seven. For the nodes the table works only one way and still fills every sign: Rahu and Ketu rule none of the twelve in the sign data (the planet table records them only as co-lords, of Aquarius and of Scorpio), and each node row names all seven sign lords, so each has six friend’s signs. A neutral grade here is never a default for a graha the row left out, because every row names every sign lord. Exaltation and debilitation, which outrank this grading, are set out on the exalted planets page and the neecha bhanga page.

Graha Maitri in Matching Uses the Same Seven Rows

In kundli matching the same relationships return as a koota. The Graha Maitri koota page takes the lords of the bride’s and groom’s Moon signs and scores the pair by how each lord’s row lists the other; the seven rows it reads match the grid above entry for entry, a match this page checks every time it is built. The scores are that page’s subject and are not repeated here. Graha maitri in astrology outside matching means the chart-reading table itself, which is what this page sets out.

Parashari practice does not stop at the natural table. Astrologers in that school also count a temporary relationship from where two grahas sit in a particular chart and combine it with the natural one. The site’s tables hold no rules for that step, so they are not given here. Among the natural table’s uses on this site are the friend’s-sign and enemy’s-sign wording on planet-in-sign pages and the Graha Maitri koota; this page claims nothing about what a friendship or an enmity brings.

The house-based companion to this page is digbala, the directional strength of the planets. Lordship by lagna is worked through on the kendra-trikona raja yoga page, and the named combinations are compared on the list of kundli yogas and how common they are. In Hindi: ग्रह मैत्री चक्र: ग्रहों की नैसर्गिक मित्रता की तालिका.