Shravana

Shravana is the twenty-second nakshatra, from 280 to 293 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac in Capricorn, near the star Altair. Its Vimshottari ruler is the Moon, its presiding deity is Vishnu, the preserver, and its symbol is an ear, or the three footprints with which Vishnu strode across the worlds. The name means hearing or listening. Jyotisha reads Shravana through the act of listening, learning, tradition received by ear, the connection made through attentive hearing, and classes it as Deva gana. The three footprints tie it to Vishnu's cosmic strides and to the preservation of knowledge across the worlds. These are interpretive conventions of the tradition, laid over the Capricorn stars near Altair that Indian astronomy assigns here.

Shravana's padas run through Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. The three strides of Vishnu, by which the god is said in the Rigveda to have measured out the three worlds in a single act, are among the oldest and most frequently cited images in the whole Vedic corpus, predating the elaborate avatar mythology of later Puranic Vishnu worship, so the mansion's symbol connects it to a genuinely archaic layer of the tradition rather than to later devotional accretion. Altair, the bright star near this segment, is also the anchor of the well-known separated-lovers myth found independently in Chinese and Japanese star lore, the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd kept apart by the Milky Way and permitted to meet once a year, a parallel of shared subject matter between unrelated traditions rather than a documented case of transmission.

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. Shravana runs from 280 degrees 00 minutes to 293 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 Capricorn, the second from 13 degrees 20 minutes of Capricorn, the third from 16 degrees 40 minutes of Capricorn and the fourth from 20 degrees 00 minutes of Capricorn. 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 Shravana 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.