Revati

Revati is the twenty-seventh and final nakshatra, from 346 degrees 40 minutes to 360 degrees of the sidereal zodiac, closing out Pisces and the circle. Its Vimshottari ruler is Mercury, its presiding deity is Pushan, the nourisher and protector of travellers and herds, and its symbol is a fish or a drum. The name means the wealthy or the prosperous. Jyotisha reads Revati through safe passage, nourishment, and the completion of a journey, Pushan guiding souls and flocks home, the fish swimming in the cosmic waters at the zodiac's end, and classes it as Deva gana. As the last mansion it carries a theme of endings that shelter and see things through. These are traditional readings laid over the Pisces stars that Indian astronomy counts at the close of the circle.

Revati's padas fall in Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer, the final four padas of the whole twenty-seven-fold sequence before the circle restarts at Ashwini. Pushan is one of the Adityas, a pastoral and guiding god invoked in the Rigveda as protector of roads, herds and travellers and as the guide of the dead to the next world, an office that gives Revati's closing position in the sequence a natural thematic fit as the mansion of safe conclusion and transition. Some classical sources also identify Revati's star with a point close to zero degrees Aries rather than the end of Pisces, reflecting an older ayanamsha, a different fixing of the sidereal zodiac's starting point, a technical disagreement among astronomers over exactly where the fixed zodiac should be anchored that is separate from, though related to, the tropical-sidereal distinction discussed elsewhere in this atlas.

A nakshatra spans thirteen degrees twenty minutes, which is a wide gate. The four padas that quarter it are what make the division precise enough to be worked with. Revati runs from 346 degrees 40 minutes to 0 degrees 00 minutes of the sidereal circle, and its four padas are three degrees twenty minutes each: the first from 16 degrees 40 minutes of Pisces, the second from 20 degrees 00 minutes of Pisces, the third from 23 degrees 20 minutes of Pisces and the fourth from 26 degrees 40 minutes of Pisces. 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 Revati fall in Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces 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.