Pushya

Pushya is the eighth nakshatra, from 93 degrees 20 minutes to 106 degrees 40 minutes of the sidereal zodiac, within Cancer near the faint cluster Praesepe. Its Vimshottari ruler is Saturn, its presiding deity is Brihaspati, guru of the gods and lord of the planet Jupiter, and its symbol is a cow's udder or a lotus. The name means to nourish. Jyotisha holds Pushya to be among the most auspicious of all the nakshatras, a mansion of nourishment, care, and spiritual sustenance, classed as Deva gana. The combination of disciplined Saturn with the priestly wisdom of Brihaspati gives it a grounded, protective, teaching quality. These are traditional interpretations; the underlying stars are the modest group in Cancer that later Western astronomy knew as the Beehive.

Pushya's padas run through Cancer, Leo, Virgo and Libra. Brihaspati, guru of the gods, is also the Sanskrit name for the planet Jupiter, so the mansion's presiding deity and its Vimshottari ruler, Saturn, are read together as a study in contrast, teaching wisdom under disciplined restraint, which several classical commentators single out as the reason Pushya is judged auspicious for almost any undertaking except marriage, a traditional exception noted since at least medieval jyotisha compilations though the precise textual origin of the marriage exclusion is not uniformly traced by modern scholars. Praesepe, the star cluster underlying this segment, was recorded by Hipparchus and Aratus in the Greek tradition as one of the oldest cited nebulous objects in Western astronomy as well, an independent naming tradition for the same patch of sky.

The nakshatra is not the last cut. Each one is divided again into four padas, and most of what a jyotishi reads from a lunar position is read at that level rather than at the level of the nakshatra itself. Pushya runs from 93 degrees 20 minutes to 106 degrees 40 minutes of the sidereal circle, and its four padas are three degrees twenty minutes each: the first from 3 degrees 20 minutes of Cancer, the second from 6 degrees 40 minutes of Cancer, the third from 10 degrees 00 minutes of Cancer and the fourth from 13 degrees 20 minutes of Cancer. 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 Pushya fall in Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio 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.