Origin 1200 BCE to 900 BCE
Vishakha, the sixteenth nakshatra, spans 200 to 213 degrees 20 minutes, bridging Tula (Libra) and Vrishchika (Scorpio). Its Vimshottari ruler is Guru (Jupiter) and its presiding deities are Indra and Agni, the paired gods of power and fire. Its symbol is a triumphal archway or a potter wheel, its gana Rakshasa (demonic). The name means the forked or two-branched; Vishakha embodies determined, goal-focused ambition, the concentrated effort that drives toward triumph. Natives are purposeful, energetic, competitive, and patient in pursuit, single-minded in reaching their aim and rejoicing in hard-won victory.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1200 BCE to 900 BCE 1Tradition: Taittiriya Samhita, where the nakshatra series begins with Krittika Origin Period600 to 800 CE 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra Origin Periodc. 1200 to 900 BCE: named among the nakshatras of the earliest Vedic lists, the Taittiriya Samhita and Taittiriya Brahmana, in the sequence that opens with Krittika rather than Ashwini. 1Tradition: Taittiriya Samhita, where the nakshatra series begins with Krittika Origin Periodc. 600 to 800 CE: carried forward into the classical Jyotisha literature the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra represents, by which point precession had shifted the sequence's starting point from Krittika to Ashwini. 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra Origin of the Name'Vishakha' compounds vi, apart, with shakha, a branch: the forked or two-branched one, describing the pair of stars the asterism is built from. 3 Identity
Astronomical DefinitionIdentified with the stars Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Iota Librae. 1 Zodiacal Span Order
Position in the Sequence14 1Tradition: Taittiriya Samhita, where the nakshatra series begins with Krittika Attestation
HistoricityOne of the twenty seven nakshatras named in the earliest Vedic lists, the Taittiriya Samhita and Taittiriya Brahmana and the Atharvaveda's own nakshatra hymn, and retained without interruption into every later classical Jyotisha catalogue, carrying the Vimshottari dasha, gana and panchanga assignments the working twenty seven still use. 2 Attributions
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Vishakha, the Triumphal Archway
Vishakha is the sixteenth nakshatra, straddling the Libra-Scorpio boundary from 200 to 213 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac. Its Vimshottari ruler is Jupiter; its presiding deities are the paired Indra and Agni (Indragni), gods of the thunderbolt and the sacred fire; and its symbol is a triumphal archway or a potter's wheel. The name means forked or two-branched. Jyotisha reads Vishakha through focused, goal-driven purpose that concentrates toward a single aim, the archway one passes through in triumph, and classes it as Rakshasa gana. The double deity gives it a theme of combined power directed to victory, with a note of the delayed reward that comes just after the branching point. These are interpretive conventions laid over the Libra-Scorpio border stars Indian astronomy assigns here.
Vishakha's padas run through Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. Indragni, the paired invocation of Indra and Agni together, appears as a single compound deity in Vedic ritual formulas distinct from either god invoked alone, and its use here as Vishakha's presiding pair is one of relatively few nakshatras assigned a compound rather than a single deity, a structural oddity some commentators connect to the mansion's own forked, two-branched name and its position straddling the Libra-Scorpio boundary. The potter's wheel given as an alternate symbol in some classical lists, rather than the triumphal archway, points to a variant tradition of nakshatra symbolism that differs across regional and sectarian compilations of the doctrine, a divergence recorded rather than resolved in the secondary literature.
The Four Padas of Vishakha
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. Vishakha runs from 200 degrees 00 minutes to 213 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal circle, and its four padas are three degrees twenty minutes each: the first from 20 degrees 00 minutes of Libra, the second from 23 degrees 20 minutes of Libra, the third from 26 degrees 40 minutes of Libra and the fourth from 0 degrees 00 minutes of Scorpio. 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 Vishakha 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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Agni, Deities Named with Indra as a presiding deity of the lunar mansion Vishakha.
Indra, Deities Named with Agni as a presiding deity of the lunar mansion Vishakha.
Classification
One of the nine nakshatras this atlas assigns to the gana. The gana is a statement about temperament for marriage matching, not about the star.
Originates in Language
Sources
1. Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature
David Pingree, Otto Harrassowitz, 1981On the nakshatra system, its Vedic antecedents, and the twenty-seven and twenty-eight fold divisionsView the Source 2. Encyclopedia of Hinduism
Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.), Routledge, 2008View the Source 3. A Sanskrit-English Dictionary
4. Atharva-Veda Samhita
William Dwight Whitney, Harvard Oriental Series, 1905Book 19, hymn 7: the list of the asterisms, which begins with KrittikaView the Source History of Dharmasastra, Volume V
P. V. Kane, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1958Vol. V, on the nakshatras, their presiding deities, and their use in muhurtaView the Source Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra
Sage Parashara (attributed), Ranjan Publications, 1984On the nakshatras, their lords, and the Vimshottari dasha reckoned from the natal MoonView the Source The Yavanajataka of Sphujidhvaja
David Pingree, Harvard University Press, 1978On the Greek material absorbed into Sanskrit horoscopy, and what in the nakshatra scheme predates itView the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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