Krittika is the third nakshatra, straddling the Aries-Taurus boundary from 26 degrees 40 minutes to 40 degrees of the sidereal zodiac. Its asterism is the Pleiades, one of the few nakshatras securely identified with a visible star cluster. Its Vimshottari ruler is the Sun, its presiding deity is Agni, god of fire, and its symbol is a razor or a flame. The fire imagery is consistent across the attributions, and jyotisha reads the mansion as cutting, purifying, and sharp, capable of burning away as readily as of cooking and nourishing. It is classed as Rakshasa gana. In myth the Krittikas are the six mothers who nurse the war-god Kartikeya, and the mansion carries that maternal-yet-martial double sense. These are traditional interpretations laid over the star cluster the Greeks knew as the Pleiades and Indian astronomy counts here.
Krittika sits at a genuinely disputed point in the history of the nakshatra scheme: several early Vedic textual references appear to treat it, not Ashwini, as the first of the mansions, which has been read by some historians of Indian astronomy as evidence that the list was once anchored to the Pleiades' position near the vernal point in an earlier epoch, before precession carried that point into Aries and Ashwini took over as the conventional start. The matter is not resolved, and modern jyotisha uniformly begins the count at Ashwini regardless. The six Krittika mothers of the Kartikeya myth are traditionally named the six wives of the sages of the Great Bear, cast out and later reconciled to the constellation Pleiades by the god's birth story, a myth that also explains the war-god's alternate name Kartikeya, son of the Krittikas.