Hasta

Hasta is the thirteenth nakshatra, from 160 to 173 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac within Virgo. Its Vimshottari ruler is the Moon, its presiding deity is Savitr, the solar deity of the vivifying, impelling power of the Sun, and its symbol is a hand or open palm. The name simply means the hand. Jyotisha reads Hasta through skill, craft, dexterity, and the capacity to grasp and hold, what the hand can make, heal, or seize, and classes it as Deva gana. Savitr's association lends it a quality of skilful, well-directed effort and the blessing that comes of applied dexterity. These are interpretive conventions of the tradition; the underlying stars are the small quadrilateral in Corvus that Indian astronomy counts in this segment.

Hasta's padas fall in Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. Savitr is frequently treated in Vedic literature as an aspect or epithet of the Sun rather than a fully separate deity, most famously invoked in the Gayatri mantra addressed to Savitr as the vivifying solar power, so Hasta's presiding deity connects it to solar energy in its active, impelling sense even though its Vimshottari ruler is the Moon rather than the Sun. Corvus, the small quadrilateral asterism underlying this mansion, is one of the more compact and easily recognised star groups used across several ancient sky traditions, its four principal stars forming a distinctive uneven square that several cultures independently read as a bird or a container, an image loosely consonant with Hasta's own symbol of a cupped, grasping hand.

Every nakshatra is quartered. The four padas, literally feet, are the smallest unit jyotisha divides the ecliptic into and the reason the system can say anything finer than thirteen degrees. Hasta runs from 160 degrees 00 minutes to 173 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal circle, and its four padas are three degrees twenty minutes each: the first from 10 degrees 00 minutes of Virgo, the second from 13 degrees 20 minutes of Virgo, the third from 16 degrees 40 minutes of Virgo and the fourth from 20 degrees 00 minutes of Virgo. The Moon crosses a single pada in roughly six hours, so a birth an afternoon apart can fall in two of them.

The arithmetic hides a coincidence that is not one. Twenty seven nakshatras of four padas make one hundred and eight divisions of the zodiac, and the navamsha, the ninth-part chart that jyotisha treats as the most important of all the divisional charts, also cuts the circle into one hundred and eight. They are the same cut. A pada is a navamsha, and naming the pada names the navamsha sign without any further calculation. The four padas of Hasta fall in Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer in that order.

Two cautions attach to those degrees. They are sidereal, measured from a fixed point among the stars rather than from the equinox, so they depend on the ayanamsha chosen to locate that point; the Lahiri, Raman and Krishnamurti values differ by up to about a degree, which is a fifth of a pada and enough to move a chart across a boundary. And the equal arcs are a scheme laid over the sky rather than a description of it: the star the nakshatra is named for sits somewhere inside its arc rather than filling it, and for several nakshatras that identification is itself disputed.