The Mystic Hexagon: Two Triangles That Run Your Chart

Most chart reading moves house by house, planet by planet. Bepin Behari, in Fundamentals of Vedic Astrology, asks you to step back and look at the geometry first. Six of the twelve houses form two interlaced triangles, and those two triangles, pulling against each other, run the whole drama of a human life. He calls their union the mystic hexagon, the same six-pointed figure Tantra uses as a talisman for mastery over the powers of nature.

The Spiritual Triangle: houses 1, 5 and 9

The First, Fifth and Ninth houses form the Triangle of Spirituality. The First house is the self, the incarnating soul in its body. The Fifth is the house of creative intelligence, mantra, discipleship and the merit you are making now: actions performed in this life whose fruits, Behari notes, may not ripen until a later one. The Ninth is the house of luck, and its luck is not random. It signifies karmic actions performed in earlier lives whose fruits are now ripe for the individual to enjoy, which is why a well-fortified Ninth house can carry a chart through several disquieting features and make life smooth sailing.

The trines are called Lakshmisthana, the residence of Lakshmi, goddess of fortune. Their lords are almost always beneficial, and when they link with the kendras, the houses of Vishnu the preserver, Behari says the individual experiences a great influx of Divine grace: guidance through life's trials, high status, renown and satisfaction. Lakshmi Yoga, in its several variants, is simply this union made precise, the lord of the Ascendant and the lord of the Ninth associated, each strong, each well placed.

The Triangle of Materiality: houses 3, 7 and 11

Against the Spiritual Triangle stands the Triangle of Materiality, or Maya: the Third, Seventh and Eleventh houses. Behari is careful to say it is not a triangle of misery. It is the way of life in which the soul is at rest between battles, marking time, giving full rein to the sense organs. The Third house is the roadside resting place: siblings, courage, short journeys, daydreams, the confusion of a mind beginning to turn from higher values toward physical growth and pleasure. The Eleventh is a much deeper involvement: wealth, gains, ornaments, cleverness in earning, desires of every kind finding a repository. The Seventh, the angle on which the triangle stands, is the final depth of material immersion: sensuality, partnership, the interruption of the journey, known in the texts also as a house of death.

His reading of planets in the Seventh is unsparing. No planet gives wholly favorable results there, he says: the Sun jeopardizes marital harmony, the Moon makes the spouse fickle, Mars is dangerous for enduring married life, and Saturn, Rahu and Ketu are never favorable. Relationship, in this frame, is where the material world makes its strongest claim on the pilgrim.

Reading your own hexagon

Practically, Behari's geometry gives you three questions to ask of any chart. Are the trines and their lords strong, dignified, and linked to the kendras? Then grace supports effort, and help arrives as if from an unknown quarter. Is the material triangle heavily energized while the trines are weak? Then cravings run the life, and the mind, in his phrase, is under the sway of Maya, unable to perceive the right values or make the right decisions. And is there exchange or association between the two triangles? A lord of the Third or Eleventh reaching into the trines, or a trine lord placed in the material houses, mixes the currents: worldly skill put at the service of the spirit, or spiritual merit spent on acquisition.

One caution from the same chapter: an exchange between the lords of the Third and Eleventh, which in trine logic would be auspicious, can instead make the native weak, diseased and covetous, though it also gives courage and prowess. The material triangle plays by its own rules. That is precisely why Behari draws the hexagon before he reads a single planet: it tells you which current of life you are looking at, and what any planet placed there is really doing.