Magha is the tenth nakshatra, from 120 to 133 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac at the start of Leo, and its star is Regulus, the royal heart of the Lion. Its Vimshottari ruler is Ketu, its presiding deities are the Pitris, the ancestral fathers, and its symbol is a throne. The name means the mighty or the bountiful. Jyotisha reads Magha as a mansion of lineage, inheritance, honour, and the authority handed down from the ancestors, the throne one succeeds to rather than earns, and classes it as Rakshasa gana. The Pitri connection gives it a strong theme of ancestral duty and remembrance. These are traditional readings; the underlying star, Regulus, is the first-magnitude marker that many ancient cultures also treated as royal.
Magha's padas run through Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. The Pitris invoked as its presiding deities are not a single group but several classes of ancestral spirit distinguished in different Vedic and Puranic lists, and the mansion's association with ancestor worship connects it to the classical Hindu ritual calendar's own season for such rites, Pitru Paksha, a lunar fortnight later in the year kept for offerings to the ancestors regardless of where the Moon then stands. Regulus itself sits almost exactly on the ecliptic, a position that makes it unusually prone to lunar and planetary occultation, and this same closeness to the Moon's path is presumably why so prominent a star was assigned so early a mansion in the sequence rather than left unattached to any station.