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In short
A house lord is the graha that rules the sign occupying a house. With whole-sign houses the 1st house is the rising sign, so its ruler is the Lagna lord, and every other lord follows from counting signs. This app reads each house through its lord's dignity, and reads a Mahadasha through the houses its lord rules.
What the term means
Every sign has a ruling graha, and a bhava's lord is the ruler of the sign that occupies it. In this app's whole-sign houses, the rising sign is the 1st house and each later house is the next sign, so the lords follow from the Lagna alone. Mars rules Aries and Scorpio, Venus Taurus and Libra, Mercury Gemini and Virgo, the Moon Cancer, the Sun Leo, Jupiter Sagittarius and Pisces, Saturn Capricorn and Aquarius. Rahu and Ketu rule no sign here, so they are never a house lord. A planet that rules two signs is lord of two houses at once.
Where the term comes from
BPHS Ch. 4 names a ruler as it describes each sign. Ch. 24, "Effects of the Bhava Lords", is the long catalogue built on the idea: the lord of each house placed in each of the twelve houses, which is where pages such as "the 7th lord in the 10th house" come from. Ch. 34 Sl. 2-7 then grades lordship itself: the lord of a trine gives auspicious results, the lords of the 3rd, 6th and 11th are listed as giving evil effects, and the 8th and 12th lords are said to act according to their associations.
How this app uses it
- The house list reads each house through its lord's dignity: favourable when the lord is exalted, in moolatrikona, its own sign or a friendly sign, testing when it is debilitated or in an enemy sign, neutral otherwise. For a 1990-05-15, 10:30 IST Mumbai chart with Cancer rising, the 1st reads "Moon rules your 1st house and sits in Sagittarius (an enemy sign, house 6)" and is marked testing.
- In the same chart Saturn rules both the 7th and the 8th, and both houses take their tone from the one Saturn in Capricorn.
- A Mahadasha is read partly through the houses its lord rules, counted from the Ascendant, so the same planet brings different house themes to different rising signs.
- Kendra-Kona Raj Yoga, the Vipareeta yogas and the Arudha (Bhava Pada) calculation all start by finding a house lord.
Pages that use this term
- The 7th lord in the 10th house - one of the 144 lord-in-house pages.
- The 1st house (Tanu Bhava) - the Lagna lord.
- What a Mahadasha is - why the houses a period lord rules matter.
- Saturn Mahadasha - a two-sign lord's period.
- Bhava Padas calculator - counts from each house's lord.
- Vimshottari Dasha calculator - lists the houses each period lord rules.
Related terms
- Dignity - the condition a lord is judged by.
- Yogakaraka - a lord of both an angle and a trine.
- Parivartana - two lords in each other's signs.
- Bhava pada - the Arudha counted from a house lord.