Mrigashira is the fifth nakshatra, spanning the Taurus-Gemini boundary from 53 degrees 20 minutes to 66 degrees 40 minutes of the sidereal zodiac, in the region of Orion's head stars. Its Vimshottari ruler is Mars, its presiding deity is Soma (the Moon god and the sacred draught), and its symbol is a deer's head. The name means the deer's head, and jyotisha reads the mansion through the image of the searching, gentle, restless deer: seeking, curious, and easily startled. It is classed as Deva gana. The Soma association lends it a quality of the sought-after and the delightful. As with every nakshatra, these are the tradition's interpretive layers; the stars involved are the faint group at the head of Orion that Indian astronomy assigns to this segment.
Mrigashira's padas fall in Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer. The deer-head myth most often cited in modern jyotisha manuals, Prajapati pursuing his own daughter in the form of a deer and being shot by Rudra as Mrigavyadha, belongs to a cluster of Puranic stories about divine transgression and punishment rather than to the nakshatra doctrine specifically, and its attachment to this particular mansion is a later interpretive layer rather than a claim made in the earliest sources that fix Soma as presiding deity. Soma here denotes both the Moon god and the sacrificial draught extracted from a plant in Vedic ritual, and the double sense, a substance sought and pressed out, and a heavenly body itself the object of longing, reinforces the mansion's association with searching and desire beyond the deer image alone.