6 min · Goal: Name the nine grahas and explain why the list differs from Western astrology.
Jyotish uses nine grahas: the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Rahu and Ketu. Western astrology adds Uranus, Neptune and Pluto and does not use Rahu and Ketu at all. The lists overlap but they are not the same system with a few extras.
The outer planets are absent because classical Jyotish was built on what could be seen. Everything in the list is visible to the naked eye, or — in the case of the nodes — visible in its effects, since they are where eclipses happen. Some modern practitioners incorporate the outer planets; most traditional practice does not, and none of the classical techniques depend on them.
The word is usually translated as planet, but it means something closer to "one who seizes" or "one who grasps". The grahas are treated as agents that take hold of an area of life, not as inert bodies whose positions merely correlate with events.
That framing matters for how the tradition reasons. A graha in a house is doing something to that house. It is why placements are described in active language throughout — a planet occupies, aspects, afflicts, or supports.
Calling them planets is astronomically wrong and astrologically standard. From an Earth-based observational frame, which is what a chart is, they move across the sky like the others do, and the tradition classifies them accordingly. They are often called the luminaries when the distinction matters.
Both are unusual in ruling only one sign each — the Sun rules Leo, the Moon rules Cancer — while the five true planets rule two.
These are not bodies at all. They are the two points where the Moon’s orbit crosses the plane of the Earth’s orbit — the lunar nodes. When a new or full Moon happens near one of them, you get an eclipse, which is why they are known as the shadow grahas and are mythologically associated with a demon that swallows the Sun.
They are always exactly opposite each other, they always move backwards through the zodiac, and they rule no signs. Because they have no bodies, the tradition reads them as acting through whatever they touch: a node in a house takes on the character of that house and its lord, amplified and distorted.
Practitioners disagree about their dignity — whether they can be exalted or debilitated, and where. That disagreement is genuine and old, and it is worth knowing that any confident statement about Rahu being exalted in a particular sign belongs to one school rather than to the tradition as a whole.
Why does Vedic astrology not use Pluto, and what would be lost if it did?