Bharani is the second nakshatra, spanning 13 degrees 20 minutes to 26 degrees 40 minutes of the sidereal zodiac, entirely within Aries. Its Vimshottari ruler is Venus, its presiding deity is Yama, lord of death and dharma, and its symbol is the yoni, the female generative organ. The pairing of Venus, Yama, and the yoni gives the mansion its traditional theme in jyotisha: the tension between creation and limit, desire and the discipline that death imposes on it. It is classed as Manushya gana, human-tempered. Astrologers read Bharani as a mansion of bearing and endurance, the name is linked to the root for carrying or nurturing, and of the moral weight Yama represents. As with all nakshatra lore, these are interpretive conventions of the tradition; the associated stars sit in the region of the Pleiades' approach within Aries.
Bharani's four padas of 3 degrees 20 minutes each fall respectively in Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio for the purpose of the Navamsha count, the standard rotating pada-to-sign assignment used across all twenty-seven mansions. In the Puranic material Yama is himself sometimes counted among the Adityas, solar deities born of Aditi, which sits oddly beside his stern office as lord of death, and commentators read the tension as part of why Bharani's imagery mixes bearing and constraint rather than presenting either theme cleanly on its own. Some later astrological compilations also connect the mansion with the goddess Kali in her fiercer aspect, an association not universal across the classical sources and treated by modern jyotishis as a regional or sectarian layer added on top of the older Yama attribution rather than as an alternative to it.