In part one we read the verses. Parashara gives Aquarius and Scorpio to Rahu and Ketu in two places, and Jataka Parijata gives Rahu a different set of signs altogether. Anyone who says the texts are silent has not read them.
But there is a word that appears in almost every modern discussion of this subject and in none of those verses. That word is co-lord.
This part follows the word. Where it came from, why somebody needed it, and what happened to it afterwards.
This is Part 2 of a part-wise series.
What the Sanskrit uses instead
Look again at the wording of the Chara Dasha verse and the dasha results verse.
वृश्चिकाधिपती द्वौ च केतु-भौमौ स्मृतौ द्विज ।
शनि-राहू च कुम्भस्य स्वामिनौ परिकीर्तितौ ॥ १५७ ॥
कुम्भाली च गृहौ प्रोक्तौ कन्या-मीनौ च केनचित् ॥ ३६ ॥
Every relevant word in these lines is in the dual number.
| Word | Number | Meaning |
| अधिपती | dual | the two lords |
| द्वौ | dual | two |
| केतु-भौमौ | dual | Ketu and Mars |
| स्मृतौ | dual | the two are held to be |
| स्वामिनौ | dual | the two owners |
| परिकीर्तितौ | dual | the two are declared |
| गृहौ प्रोक्तौ | dual | the two houses are declared |
Sanskrit has three numbers: singular, dual and plural. The dual is a separate grammatical form used when there are exactly two of something. It is not a way of saying one main thing and one lesser thing. It simply counts.
So the verse says: the two lords of Scorpio. Not the lord and the co-lord. Not the primary and the secondary. The Sanskrit places Mars and Ketu side by side in the same grammatical form, and says nothing at all about which of them ranks higher.
English has no dual. A translator working from these lines has to choose an English phrase, and every available phrase adds something the Sanskrit left out.
The translator who chose the word
The word co-ruler enters through R. Santhanam, and it is possible to point at the exact page.
It is not in his translation of any verse. It is in a note. The verse he is commenting on is not either of the two we have read so far. It is the Arudha chapter, chapter 29 in his edition, verses 6 and 7, which deal with the Arudha of a planet.
If a planet owns two Rasis or if a Rasi is owned by two planets, consider the stronger and declare effects accordingly.
That verse assumes something. It assumes that some sign somewhere has two owners, otherwise the second half of the rule would never be used. Santhanam noticed this, and wrote underneath it:
Since the sage uses “Rasi owned by two planets” he obviously hints at co-rulership of Rahu and Ketu. Rahu is a co-ruler of Aquarius while Ketu shares ownership of Scorpio (Vide sloka 157, ch. 46 infra).
That is the birth of the word in English, as far as I can trace it in these editions. A commentator saw a rule that needs a two-lorded sign, remembered a verse three hundred pages later that supplies one, and joined them with a word English speakers would understand.
I want to be fair to him. He was not inventing a doctrine. He was solving a translation problem that Sanskrit did not have. Girish Chand Sharma faced the same problem and chose differently: his heading over the same verse reads Signs of dual lordship. One Sanskrit dual, two English solutions, and the two do not carry the same weight.
The same translator drew the boundary
There is a second note by Santhanam that is quoted far less often. It sits in the Rajayoga chapter, on the verse about how Rahu and Ketu deliver results.
As already stated, Rahu owns Aquarius and Ketu Scorpio. Still they do not have a disposition of their own in the matter of giving particular effects. (In point of fact, these ownerships are for calculation of some of Jaimini dasas etc. and not in a common context.) Inasmuch as they do not have a sign of their own, they have also not been specifically classified as malefic or benefic for the various ascendants.
Read that carefully. In one paragraph he writes that Rahu owns Aquarius, and that they do not have a sign of their own. Both. The tension we are examining was in his mind while he wrote.
And in the middle of it he states the boundary in plain words: these ownerships are for calculation of some Jaimini dasas, and not in a common context. The man who gave us the word co-ruler also told us where it applies.
Notice where all three passages sit
Put the three places together and a pattern appears that is hard to miss.
| Passage | Chapter subject | Technique |
| BPHS 29.6 to 7 | Arudha of a planet | Jaimini |
| BPHS 46.157 | Chara Dasha | Jaimini |
| BPHS 47.34 to 36 | Results of dashas | Dasha |
Not one of them is a chapter on sign lordship, house lordship, yogas, strength, or the divisional charts. Every single occurrence sits inside a dasha or Jaimini technique. The verse that requires a two lorded sign is an Arudha rule. The verse that supplies one is a Chara Dasha rule. The verse that lists the nodes’ signs states that it is doing so in order to explain their dasha results.
The word co-lord was therefore born inside that boundary, from a note on a Jaimini verse pointing to another Jaimini verse. It then walked out.
The second change: co-lord becomes lord
Once the word was in circulation, something happened to it that happens to many technical terms. The qualifier fell off.
This is ordinary language behaviour and not anyone’s fault. Co-lord is a clumsy word to say aloud. In a class, in a video, in a conversation between two astrologers, it shortens to lord within a few sentences. A student hears lord, writes lord in his notes, and repeats lord to the next student.
But the two words do different work in a chart, and the difference is not small.
| Aquarius ascendant | If Rahu is a co-lord | If Rahu is the lord |
| Lagna lord | Saturn, with Rahu alongside | Rahu |
| Saturn’s condition | Still central to the reading | Often dropped |
| Dispositor of Rahu in Aquarius | Saturn | Rahu itself |
| Classical yogas on Saturn | Intact | Have to be rebuilt |
With co-lord you keep Saturn and add Rahu. With lord you replace Saturn with Rahu, and a great deal of classical technique stops working. Dispositor analysis in particular becomes circular, because a planet cannot be read through its own dispositor if it is its own dispositor.
So when someone argues that the nodes cannot own signs because it breaks the dispositor rule, they are arguing correctly against lord and not against co-lord. The two objections are usually mixed together, which is one reason this discussion never ends.
Other roads to the same place
It would be wrong to leave the impression that everything traces back to one English note. It does not. Rahu and Aquarius are connected in more than one tradition, and those traditions are not derived from each other.
In the Tamil Siddha material, Pulippani Jothidam connects Aquarius with the nodes. Saptarishi Nadi holds both Rahu and Ketu to be exalted in Scorpio, which agrees with neither of the two schemes we saw in part one. These are separate transmissions in a separate language, with their own lineages, and they arrive at similar ground by a different road.
There is also a structural argument that does not depend on any text. Shatabhisha Nakshatra, one of the three nakshatras of Rahu, falls inside Aquarius. Ardra falls in Gemini and Swati in Libra, so Aquarius is not unique in this, but it is the sign where Rahu’s nakshatra sits with a sign whose nature people find Rahu-like. That is a real observation and it deserves to be stated as what it is, an argument from structure rather than from a verse.
The modern books
Most present-day writers who state the co-rulership give no source at all. The sentence appears as a plain fact, with nothing behind it, in book after book and website after website.
This is why the opposite claim spread so easily. When a reader looks for a citation and finds none, the reasonable conclusion is that there is none. What should be said instead is narrower and more accurate: modern authors do not cite a source. That is not the same as there being no source, as part one showed.
An open question worth investigating
There is one line of enquiry that I have not been able to settle, and I would rather set it down honestly than leave it out.
Modern Western astrology assigns Aquarius to Uranus and Scorpio to Pluto. Those are the same two signs, and only those two, out of twelve. Both of the assigned planets are treated in that system as outer, disruptive and impersonal, and comparisons between Rahu and Uranus, and between Ketu and Pluto, were drawn quite often in the twentieth century when Indian and Western astrology were being read side by side.
The coincidence is large enough to be worth checking. If the Rahu and Aquarius pairing appears in Indian writing only from the twentieth century onward, that would be one kind of finding. If it appears well before Uranus and Pluto were discovered, that would be another, and the coincidence would then be a genuine convergence rather than a borrowing.
The verses in part one already show that the pairing is far older than any Western influence, because it stands in Parashara. So the question is not about the pairing itself. It is about the co-rulership language and its spread into everyday reading. Dating the earliest Indian sources that use ownership language outside a dasha context would settle it. Until somebody does that work, this remains a question and not a claim.
What this part settles
The word co-lord is not a translation of anything. The Sanskrit uses the dual and says the two lords, without ranking them. English has no dual, so a word had to be supplied, and Santhanam supplied co-ruler in a note on an Arudha verse. Sharma supplied dual lordship for the same verse.
The word was created inside a Jaimini and dasha context, and the translator who created it said in another note that this is where it belongs. It then left that context, and afterwards lost its first half in ordinary speech, at which point it started removing Saturn from charts.
None of this decides whether treating Rahu as a lord of Aquarius produces better readings. That is a different kind of question and no amount of textual work will answer it. Part three takes it up, along with the dispositor problem and what actually changes in a chart when the lord of a sign is changed.
Shatabhisha Research Observation
Classical Fact
No Sanskrit verse examined here contains a word meaning co-lord. The verses use the dual number and say the two lords. The English word co-ruler appears in R. Santhanam’s note on the Arudha verses of chapter 29, cross referenced to verse 157 of chapter 46. Girish Chand Sharma renders the same idea as dual lordship. All three passages where the nodes are given signs sit inside Arudha, Chara Dasha or dasha results.
Modern Opinion
Co-lord is used today as though it were a classical term, usually with no source given, and in speech it commonly shortens to lord. Separate Tamil Siddha and Nadi lines connect the nodes with Aquarius and Scorpio independently of Parashara. Whether the co-rulership language spread partly under Western influence is an open question that dating the earliest sources would settle.
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