Jyeshtha is the eighteenth nakshatra, from 226 degrees 40 minutes to 240 degrees of the sidereal zodiac in Scorpio, and its star is the red Antares, the scorpion's heart. Its Vimshottari ruler is Mercury, its presiding deity is Indra, king of the gods, and its symbol is an earring or a protective umbrella. The name means the eldest or the senior. Jyotisha reads Jyeshtha through seniority, authority, and the responsibility and isolation that come with rank, Indra's kingship, hard-won and guarded, and classes it as Rakshasa gana. The umbrella marks protection and status. It is treated as an intense mansion carrying the weight of eldership. These are traditional readings laid over Antares, the first-magnitude red star Indian astronomy places at the scorpion's heart.
Jyeshtha's padas run through Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer. Indra's kingship in Vedic myth is repeatedly won and threatened rather than simply inherited, most famously nearly lost to the demon Vritra before being restored, and Jyeshtha's reading of authority as hard-won and precariously guarded, rather than comfortably possessed, follows this specific mythic character of Indra rather than kingship in the abstract. Antares and Aldebaran, the stars marking Jyeshtha and Rohini respectively, sit almost exactly opposite one another across the sky, and this near-perfect opposition between the mansion of hard-won seniority and the mansion the Moon is said to love best is sometimes noted by jyotishis as one of several structural symmetries built into the twenty-seven-fold scheme, whether by original design or later interpretive convenience is not established.