Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Meena: The Dual Water of the Fishes

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Meena: The Dual Water of the Fishes

Meena is the twelfth and final rashi, the Vedic sign of the fishes, corresponding to Pisces. In jyotisha it is ruled by Jupiter (Guru), and it is the sign of Venus's exaltation, where Venus is held strongest. Its quality is dual or mutable (dvisvabhava), and its element is water (jala tattva). Jyotisha reads Meena through Jupiter's wisdom dissolved into feeling and the two fishes: compassion, imagination, surrender, and the merging of the self into something larger. As the last sign it carries themes of completion, liberation (moksha), and letting go. As a sidereal sign it is fixed to the stars and runs about 24 degrees behind tropical Pisces. Jupiter's rulership and Venus's exaltation here are dignities shared with Western astrology, and both traditions treat Meena as the most receptive and dissolving of the signs.

Meena, fish, translates the Greek ichthyes, fishes, plural in both languages for the sign's two linked figures; the transmission runs through the Yavanajataka, a versification of a Greek astrological text of roughly the second through fourth centuries CE, built on the twelve equal signs Babylonian celestial divination had already fixed by the fifth or fourth century BCE, with no twelve-sign zodiac of any kind attested in the older Vedic corpus. As the final rashi, Meena closes the cycle the Mesopotamian scheme opened at Mesha, and Jupiter's rulership together with Venus's exaltation here belong to the later classical layer, standardly credited to compilations such as the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra of roughly the seventh or eighth century CE, whose ascription to the sage Parashara is a pseudepigraphic attribution rather than a historical fact.

Sources Brihat Parashara Hora ShastraSage Parashara (attributed) with The Yavanajataka of SphujidhvajaDavid Pingree, Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical LiteratureDavid Pingree

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.