Sade sati: a field guide

Start with the sky, because that part is not in dispute. Saturn is a real planet and a slow one. It takes about 29.4 years to go once around the zodiac, the ring of twelve signs astrologers divide the sky into. Twelve signs, thirty years, about two and a half years to a sign.

Your moon sign is the sign the moon was in at your birth. (Indian astrology leans on the moon where newspaper horoscopes use the sun.) Sade sati is the stretch when Saturn crosses the sign before your moon sign, then your moon sign, then the one after. Three signs at two and a half years each is seven and a half years, and the name is just everyday Hindi for that number. It is arithmetic, not a curse.

Two things follow, and Nikhil Verma says the sellers mention neither. One person in four qualifies at any moment, which is close to free advertising. And Saturn returns every thirty years, so anyone who reaches sixty has lived through this twice.

The classical books do count this position among the difficult ones, but they build in brakes the market skips. They offer four things: where Saturn is, cancellations called vedha, a score called ashtakavarga for how well your chart supports that sign, and a description of the mood. The pitch quotes the first. Vedha means a planet in a particular other sign named in the rule wipes the result out.

Then the dates. Saturn appears to move backwards for months at a time. Near a sign boundary it can enter, back out and enter again, so one crossing has three defensible start dates. Two apps can even disagree about which sign your moon is in. A seller with a deadline uses the earliest.

Almost nobody notices sade sati while it is running. They notice it afterwards, once someone hands them the label, and the years reorganise themselves around it. Any seven and a half years of an adult life contain something hard. That is not credulity, Verma says. That is how memory works on everybody, including him.