Manushya

Manushya gana, the human class, covers nine nakshatras including Bharani, Rohini, Ardra, the three Phalgunis and Uttara group, Purvashadha, Uttarashadha and Purva Bhadrapada, and it denotes a mixed temperament: ambitious, sociable, concerned with family, status and material life, and neither as yielding as the divine class nor as forceful as the demonic. The classical texts associate it with rajas, the active and passionate of the three gunas. Within the Ashtakoota matching system the gana koota carries six of the thirty-six points, one of the larger weightings, and a human-class person is held to match reasonably with either of the other two classes, so the middle position is also the flexible one. The threefold scheme is set out in Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra and in the compatibility literature that grew from it.

Because the human class sits between the other two, the gana koota scores it more forgivingly than either extreme: a Manushya-Manushya pairing scores the full six points, a Manushya-Deva pairing scores five, and only a Manushya-Rakshasa pairing scores as low as one, still better than the zero given to a Deva-Rakshasa match. Astrologers who use the system accordingly treat a Manushya nakshatra as the most flexible partner gana, useful where other kootas already favour a match but the gana koota alone would otherwise cost points. The name reflects the same idea structurally: manushya, human, sits midway between deva and rakshasa much as the rajas guna the texts assign it sits midway between the clarity of sattva and the inertia of tamas.

Manushya gana is one of three temperaments assigned across the twenty seven nakshatras, and its practical home is gana kuta, one of the eight factors of the ashtakuta reckoning used in North Indian jyotisha when two horoscopes are compared before a marriage. The factor is weighted at six points out of the thirty six the full method allows, and the value is taken from the birth nakshatra of each party rather than from anything else in either chart.

Nine nakshatras are assigned to manushya gana: Bharani, Rohini, Ardra, Purva Phalguni, Uttara Phalguni, Purva Ashadha, Uttara Ashadha, Purva Bhadrapada and Uttara Bhadrapada. The pattern is worth noticing. Six of the nine belong to the four purva and uttara pairs, the mansions whose names mark them as the earlier and later halves of a shared figure, so the human temperament is concentrated in the parts of the circle that come in pairs. The classical texts do not explain this and it should not be presented as though they did.

The manushya group sits between the other two in the scoring, which is the structural reason it draws less comment than either. A manushya nakshatra paired with a deva one, or with a rakshasa one, does not produce the extremes that a deva and rakshasa pairing does. As with the whole method, this is a live practice rather than a historical one, and it is set out here as description. A reading of a real chart is work for a practitioner, not for a reference entry.