Krittika

Krittika is the third nakshatra, straddling the Aries-Taurus boundary from 26 degrees 40 minutes to 40 degrees of the sidereal zodiac. Its asterism is the Pleiades, one of the few nakshatras securely identified with a visible star cluster. Its Vimshottari ruler is the Sun, its presiding deity is Agni, god of fire, and its symbol is a razor or a flame. The fire imagery is consistent across the attributions, and jyotisha reads the mansion as cutting, purifying, and sharp, capable of burning away as readily as of cooking and nourishing. It is classed as Rakshasa gana. In myth the Krittikas are the six mothers who nurse the war-god Kartikeya, and the mansion carries that maternal-yet-martial double sense. These are traditional interpretations laid over the star cluster the Greeks knew as the Pleiades and Indian astronomy counts here.

Krittika sits at a genuinely disputed point in the history of the nakshatra scheme: several early Vedic textual references appear to treat it, not Ashwini, as the first of the mansions, which has been read by some historians of Indian astronomy as evidence that the list was once anchored to the Pleiades' position near the vernal point in an earlier epoch, before precession carried that point into Aries and Ashwini took over as the conventional start. The matter is not resolved, and modern jyotisha uniformly begins the count at Ashwini regardless. The six Krittika mothers of the Kartikeya myth are traditionally named the six wives of the sages of the Great Bear, cast out and later reconciled to the constellation Pleiades by the god's birth story, a myth that also explains the war-god's alternate name Kartikeya, son of the Krittikas.

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. Krittika runs from 26 degrees 40 minutes to 40 degrees 00 minutes of the sidereal circle, and its four padas are three degrees twenty minutes each: the first from 26 degrees 40 minutes of Aries, the second from 0 degrees 00 minutes of Taurus, the third from 3 degrees 20 minutes of Taurus and the fourth from 6 degrees 40 minutes of Taurus. 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 Krittika 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.