Malika Yoga: The Twelve Garland Patterns Explained

What Malika Yoga Means

Malika, meaning garland, is one of the more visually intuitive patterns in classical Jyotish. Instead of looking at a single planet or a single house, it looks at the whole chart at once and asks whether all seven true planets, Sun through Saturn, have lined up across exactly seven consecutive houses out of the twelve, like beads strung one after another on a single thread. Rahu and Ketu are never counted toward this pattern.

The Rule, Stated Exactly

Malika Yoga forms when all seven true planets occupy exactly seven consecutive whole-sign houses, counted from the lagna, leaving the remaining five houses empty of those seven planets. Because the run is always exactly seven houses out of twelve, the starting house is never ambiguous: there is only one place the sequence could have begun, so naming which variant applies is always straightforward once the run is identified.

The Twelve Names

The classical name for the pattern changes depending on which house the seven-house run starts from. Starting from the 1st house it is Lagna Malika, from the 2nd house Dhana Malika, from the 3rd Vikrama Malika, from the 4th Sukha Malika, from the 5th Putra Malika, from the 6th Satru Malika, from the 7th Kalatra Malika, from the 8th Randhra Malika, from the 9th Bhagya Malika, from the 10th Karma Malika, from the 11th Labha Malika, and from the 12th Vyaya Malika.

A few of these are worth describing individually. Lagna Malika, the run starting at the 1st house, carries a theme of command and personal drive, the self at the head of the garland. Dhana Malika, starting at the 2nd, leans toward wealth alongside the responsibilities of family life. Putra Malika, starting at the 5th, is associated classically with fame and a devotional temperament. Karma Malika, starting at the 10th, points toward reputation built through visible work. Labha Malika, starting at the 11th, suggests skillful, steady gains. Vyaya Malika, starting at the 12th, is read as generosity paired with a tendency toward heavy spending, open handed rather than accumulating.

Two Variants With a More Mixed Classical Flavour

Not every Malika variant is read as uniformly fortunate. The Satru Malika (starting at the 6th house) and Randhra Malika (starting at the 8th house) variants classically carry a more mixed, effort and strain flavour than the others, sitting as they do across houses traditionally associated with obstacles and disruption. The overall pattern is still considered a good and fortunate one, but these two variants are described with more measured language rather than unqualified praise.

A Worked Example

Picture a chart where the seven true planets occupy houses 4 through 10, one or more planets in each of those seven houses, with houses 11, 12, 1, 2 and 3 empty of all seven. Because the run begins at the 4th house, this chart would carry Sukha Malika, the garland variant classically linked to generosity and broad fortune. If the same seven planets were shifted one house earlier, occupying houses 3 through 9 instead, the same chart shape would instead be named Vikrama Malika, since the starting house has moved.

An Honest Note on the Later Variants

Worth stating plainly: the classical source underlying this pattern is only completely preserved for the first several starting houses in the surviving text. The variants that start from houses 9 through 12, Bhagya, Karma, Labha and Vyaya Malika, extend the same structurally consistent naming pattern to complete the full set of twelve, rather than being independently attested word for word in the oldest surviving portions of the text. This does not change how the pattern is computed. It is a note on the depth of the historical paper trail for four of the twelve names, not a doubt about the rule itself.

Detected Automatically Across All Twelve Variants

Purohit's kundli engine checks every chart it generates against all twelve Malika variants, not just the earliest or best attested ones, using the actual computed house positions of all seven true planets from the Swiss Ephemeris with the Lahiri ayanamsa. If your chart carries any of the twelve, the specific variant and its classical name appear in your kundli sheet, and Purohit Ji can describe it naturally in a WhatsApp reading, in the same grounded, non-fatalistic tone used across every yoga on this site.