Chandra, also called Soma, is the lunar deity of Hinduism and one of the Navagraha, the nine celestial influences of Indian astrology. He is imagined as a youthful, radiant god riding across the night sky in a chariot drawn by antelopes or by white horses, pale and cool where his fellow-graha Surya the Sun is blazing. A well-known myth accounts for the waxing and waning of the moon.
Chandra married the twenty-seven daughters of Daksha, who are the twenty-seven nakshatras, the lunar mansions or star-groups through which the moon passes each month, but he loved only one of them, Rohini, and neglected the rest. The slighted sisters complained to their father, and Daksha cursed Chandra to waste away with a consumptive disease; when the moon had dwindled almost to nothing, the gods interceded, and the curse was softened so that Chandra would wane and then wax again, dying and reviving each month rather than once and for all. This is why, the tradition says, the moon grows and shrinks in the sky. In astrology Chandra governs the mind and the emotions, the inner tides of feeling, and he is regarded as one of the most important of the grahas for the influence he exerts on the temperament. His son by the star-goddess Tara is Budha, the planet Mercury.