Trump and the Power of the Kalasarpa

The Kalasarpa Yoga may be more powerful than we think.

For months now, astrologers have been furiously working to predict who would win this year’s election—Trump or Harris. I’ve appreciated their work, which can get complex, especially analyses in Jyotish, where there are dozens of charts within one single person’s natal chart to read and analyze. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of splitting of hairs.

For me, I was fairly satisfied with a prediction of Trump’s win based on one simple, but powerful aspect of his chart which I had been aware of since 2018—the Kalasarpa Yoga that occurs across his 4/10 axis of home and career.

A Kalasarpa Yoga (kala = time; sarpa = serpent) is a yoga which occurs when all of the planets in a chart are on one side of the Rahu/Ketu axis. It is a form of negative “hemming in” where a planet is flanked on either side by malefic planets and weakened as a result. (Imagine you have enemies closing in from you on both sides, and have to use all your power to fend them off). In the case of the kalasarpa yoga, all of the planets are hemmed in in the chart and weakened. As a result, the energy is very volatile, and heavily under the influence of the nodal axis, Rahu and Ketu.

What are Rahu and Ketu? Rahu and Ketu are the nodal points of the Moon at which eclipses occur. Since these points are associated with the factors that cause the light of the Sun and Moon to be blocked out, or “eclipsed,” they are regarded negatively in Jyotish. Rahu is the factor associated with insanity, neurosis, neurological disorders, and other abnormalities of the mind, while Ketu is associated with restriction, isolation, narrow mindedness, and a tendency towards conflict. Both of these nodes largely work on a mass level, and are key factors in the zeitgeist of any era.

One thing to note about the Kalasarpa Yoga is that its influence in a natal chart (and even its existence) is contested in Jyotish circles. As Jyotish scholar Alan Annand notes, “Kala Sarpa is not discussed in any of the traditional shastra [technical books]” and has been considered to have “no bearing on horoscopic interpretation.” But Annand himself wrote a book on the topic, recognizing its influence, and how it is deserving of more “refined principles” in natal chart interpretation. For me, visually it reveals its power, simply because the planets are squished together in one half of the chart. You can “see” the energetic pressure they’re under—which means results are almost assured.

Looking back, the 2016 election occurred during the time of a Kalasarpa yoga, and we elected a President with this energetic imprint in his chart. This 2024 election did not occur during a Kalasarpa yoga, but Trump’s path back to the Presidential seat was already firmly in place. Here’s why.

For those born under a Kalasarpa Yoga, due to the intense pressure of all the planets being pushed to one side of the chart, their lives are prone to extremes. They’ll have meteoric, unexplained rises, and devastating crashes. Since Rahu and Ketu are “outsider” energies, the native’s rises will seem to come out of left field—like a rogue stealing at night. What they achieve will be as a result of breaking taboos—not from a steady, principled climb. Because of this, loss comes. But then a rise back up—even stronger.

As Annand notes, when a Kalasarpa is formed with Rahu in the 10^th house of career and the establishment, the native will be considered “an outsider by the Establishment. Labels such as black sheep, change agent, dark horse, gate-crasher, iconoclast, renegade … all suggest both [the native’s] primal ambition (often with ulterior motives) as well as the combination of fascination and disgust with which the public witnesses his ascendancy.” We can see how this fits Trump.

On the flip side, with Ketu thrown in the 4^th house of home matters, the ”mother is likely to be problematic in the native’s eyes—absent, unknown, unaffectionate,” as Annand says, and so forth. Trump’s relationship to his mother has largely been explored, with many observing how she’s noticeably absent from his comments. This detachment from the mother and disturbance in early life can later lead to hardwired feelings of estrangement in matters of home, family, tribe, community—and even one’s country. Another thing we can see with Trump.

So back to why I felt the Kalasarpa was enough to believe he’d win again. There’s something larger at play here, clearly. Back in 2016, when I was working in deep in the heart of national public media, and I hadn’t discovered Jyotish yet, I casually predicted one day to my fellow employees Trump would win as soon as I found out he got on the Republican ticket. I knew that something had shifted—that the fact he got on the ticket felt like a symptom of a much larger, more subtle and bizarre shift in the public mind. This was met with rushed hushes, and peppered chastisement at work—my feeling he would get elected was interpreted as an endorsement, and I was criticized. It was at that point I was almost sure something was “off”—if we can’t separate statements from endorsements, I knew we were at a collective emotional pitch, driven by unconscious factors. Now, I know, this is what Rahu and Ketu will do.

Fast forward to 2024, and it was easy to see how Trump’s path was fitting the path of the Kalasarpa Yoga—and powerfully. If he could achieve the meteoric rise, and he suffered the fall with his loss in 2020, the only thing left was the climb back up. He can thank Rahu for that.

But to what end? Incidentally, the recent Covid pandemic also occurred under a Kalasarpa yoga and we can see patterns of mass shifts in hysteria, illusion, narrow-mindedness—and great rises and achievements—during this time as well. What are the collective shifts, with Trump ostensibly at the helm of the them, signaling towards? The huge, pendulum-like energetic shifts of the Kalasarpa certainly create big imbalances, but these imbalances are usually in service of a greater leveling out.

For now, I’ll leave it at that.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash