Chandra

Chandra, also called Soma, is the lunar deity of Hinduism and one of the Navagraha, the nine celestial influences of Indian astrology. He is imagined as a youthful, radiant god riding across the night sky in a chariot drawn by antelopes or by white horses, pale and cool where his fellow-graha Surya the Sun is blazing. A well-known myth accounts for the waxing and waning of the moon.

Chandra married the twenty-seven daughters of Daksha, who are the twenty-seven nakshatras, the lunar mansions or star-groups through which the moon passes each month, but he loved only one of them, Rohini, and neglected the rest. The slighted sisters complained to their father, and Daksha cursed Chandra to waste away with a consumptive disease; when the moon had dwindled almost to nothing, the gods interceded, and the curse was softened so that Chandra would wane and then wax again, dying and reviving each month rather than once and for all. This is why, the tradition says, the moon grows and shrinks in the sky. In astrology Chandra governs the mind and the emotions, the inner tides of feeling, and he is regarded as one of the most important of the grahas for the influence he exerts on the temperament. His son by the star-goddess Tara is Budha, the planet Mercury.

Chandra is pictured as a fair, youthful god, sometimes with ten arms, holding a mace, a lotus and the cup of soma nectar, drawn in his antelope yoked chariot across the sky; the crescent moon itself is treated as an ornament worn in the matted hair of Shiva, who is called Chandrashekhara, the moon crested one, linking the lunar disc directly to the great ascetic deity rather than keeping it separate. Chandra is honored chiefly through the lunar calendar he governs: Hindu religious life runs on a lunisolar reckoning in which the full moon (purnima) and new moon (amavasya) mark recurring days of fasting, pilgrimage and rite, and Monday (Somavar) is kept as his day, associated with fasts offered for peace of mind and family welfare. Rather than temples built to Chandra alone, which are rare, veneration tends to fold into wider observances: the sighting of the crescent moon is itself treated as auspicious in festivals such as Karva Chauth, where married women look for the moon to break a day-long fast, and his image appears in temple ceilings and astrological diagrams, the navagraha mandala, alongside the other eight planetary lords rather than as an independent object of a dedicated cult.

Comparatists have long noted the family resemblance between Chandra's myth of waxing and waning through a marital slight and the wider habit of tying the moon's visible cycle to a story of injury, punishment and renewal, though the specific tale of Daksha's curse is attested only within the Puranic corpus and has no single Vedic source.