Glossary · graha
Shani
Also written Saturn
Shani is Saturn — the slowest and most demanding of the visible planets, and the one most misunderstood. It is not malevolent so much as exacting: the lord of time, labour, discipline, delay and consequence. What Shani gives, it gives slowly and only when earned — and what it gives tends to last.
It signifies hardship that matures a person, old age, servants and the marginalised, the joints and the bones, and patience itself. Its long transits — the seven-and-a-half-year Sade Sati most of all — are watched closely; the tradition reads them descriptively, as seasons of testing and structure rather than punishment.
Saturn takes about two and a half years per sign and rules the nakshatras Pushya, Anuradha and Uttara Bhadrapada.
In the modern pairing of planets with the chakras, Shani is paired with the root chakra (Muladhara).
Keep reading