वक्रानुवक्रम् · ग्रहयुद्धम् · अष्टधा गतिः · नवग्रहाः
The fixed stars keep their promises — the first essay was about how much the texts built on that. The planets do not. Five lights wander against the star-road, speed up, slow down, stand still, and — most scandalously — go backwards, each in its own rhythm. Sanskrit has one word for the outrage, vakra, 'bent', and this essay follows that one word through every register the corpus owns: the war-omen, the battlefield simile, the observer's catalogue, the omen-book's own quiet demolition, and the taxonomy that finally makes the backward loop just one speed among eight.
Every quote is a slice from Jñānakośa, the research database behind this atlas; each links to its revision-pinned source page. Translations are literal renderings; dates are approximate spans of compilation. Display markup of the e-texts is removed here; the full text, apparatus and confidence grades are one click away.
वक्रानुवक्रम् · the loop as portent
Before Kurukṣetra, the Bhīṣma-parva's omen catalogue — the same one that carries the thirteen-day fortnight of the eclipse essay — reads Mars's full retrograde loop as a portent, and reads it precisely: the loop named as a single gesture (vakrānuvakram, 'the bend and the return-bend'), the star-station given, and the planet standing at the turn:
Planet, loop, station: everything a modern astronomer needs to identify the configuration is in the line — which is why these verses are the raw material of every attempt to date the war, a debate the database records without joining.
See: the omen catalogue's eclipses, in essay three
अङ्गारक इव ग्रहः · common property
Two parvans later the same loop appears with no portent attached at all. Arjuna fights his way out, turns, and comes back shining — and the poet reaches for the sky's best-known comeback. A simile only works if the audience already knows the image; by the epic's day, Mars's out-and-back was common cultural property:
भौमचार · the observer's ledger
Varāhamihira's Mars-course chapter opens with the loop already systematized: the retrograde is indexed by how far the planet has travelled from its heliacal rising — the ninth, eighth, or seventh asterism, roughly 90–120 degrees of elongation, which is in fact the band where Mars's retrograde begins. An empirical regularity, filed in omen dress:
The cāra chapters keep this ledger for every planet — Saturn's stations among the nakṣatras fed the Rohiṇī omens of the first essay. The omen register, here as everywhere, is where the positional data was archived.
ग्रहयुद्धम् · the war dissolved
When two wanderers close on each other, the omen tradition sees a war — and Varāhamihira opens his planet-war chapter by quietly dissolving it. The planets stand each on its own path, one above the other; they only 'come as if to sameness' in the observer's field of sight because the distances are so great. Conjunction as perspective across depth-ordered orbits — stated first, before a single portent is read, with the computation referred to 'my karaṇa, the Sūrya-siddhānta' and the war-taxonomy politely credited to the older school of Parāśara:
अष्टधा गतिः · the machine
The siddhānta supplies the machine. The movers are invisible 'embodiments of Time' stationed on the star-circle — śīghrocca, mandocca, pāta — hauling the planets by cords of wind:
And under that mythic dress, the honest engineering: motion is eightfold — two bent speeds and six straight ones, a taxonomy in which retrograde is not an anomaly but a named gear — and the whole correction procedure exists, says the text, 'so that the planets come to agreement with what is seen' (dṛk-tulyatā), the same clause the trepidation chapter closes on:
Behind both stands Āryabhaṭa's ledger of revolutions — the yuga counts that turn every wandering into arithmetic, packed into his alphabet-code (attested in the database at Gītikā 2–3, along with the earth's own 1,582,237,500 eastward turns).
See: the trepidation chapter's same closing clause, in essay two
कुलालचक्र · two motions at once
Why is the wanderers' motion so hard to read? The Bhāgavata's cosmography answers with the corpus's best physics image. Ants crossing a spinning potter's wheel have two motions at once — the wheel's, and their own — and are found at ever different places on it; so the planets, carried by the wheel of the sky, still creep along paths of their own. Relative motion, decomposed on a household instrument:
नवग्रहाः · nine chairs at the fire
And the ritual register seats them all at one fire. The navagraha roster runs the two luminaries and the five true wanderers in the weekday order — and then adds Rāhu and Ketu, the beheaded eclipse-demon's head and trunk, really the moon's two nodes, enrolled as planets with chairs of their own. Every mover of the sky, visible or geometric, propitiated in one rite:
See: how Rāhu earned his chair, in essay three
Follow vakra once more across the shelf: an omen-reader logs the bend-and-return with its station; a poet assumes every listener knows the red planet's comeback; a saṃhitā indexes the loop by elongation and dissolves planet-wars into line-of-sight geometry — citing its author's own computing manual as it does; a siddhānta files the backward motion as two named speeds among eight and demands the result agree with the eye; and a purāṇa hands the whole company — nodes included — chairs at the sacrificial fire. The wanderers were never tamed by any one register. They were tamed by all of them holding, together, everything the loop is: a sign, an image, a record, a geometry, and a guest.
Each quote carries its full citation, edition, revision-pinned source link and confidence grading in Jñānakośa — batch graha-vakra-pass1 with the standing astronomy passes. The five wanderers are in the sky tonight, each at its own speed — one of them may be mid-loop right now; the companion app will show you which.