Magha

Magha is the tenth nakshatra, from 120 to 133 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac at the start of Leo, and its star is Regulus, the royal heart of the Lion. Its Vimshottari ruler is Ketu, its presiding deities are the Pitris, the ancestral fathers, and its symbol is a throne. The name means the mighty or the bountiful. Jyotisha reads Magha as a mansion of lineage, inheritance, honour, and the authority handed down from the ancestors, the throne one succeeds to rather than earns, and classes it as Rakshasa gana. The Pitri connection gives it a strong theme of ancestral duty and remembrance. These are traditional readings; the underlying star, Regulus, is the first-magnitude marker that many ancient cultures also treated as royal.

Magha's padas run through Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. The Pitris invoked as its presiding deities are not a single group but several classes of ancestral spirit distinguished in different Vedic and Puranic lists, and the mansion's association with ancestor worship connects it to the classical Hindu ritual calendar's own season for such rites, Pitru Paksha, a lunar fortnight later in the year kept for offerings to the ancestors regardless of where the Moon then stands. Regulus itself sits almost exactly on the ecliptic, a position that makes it unusually prone to lunar and planetary occultation, and this same closeness to the Moon's path is presumably why so prominent a star was assigned so early a mansion in the sequence rather than left unattached to any station.

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. Magha runs from 120 degrees 00 minutes to 133 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal circle, and its four padas are three degrees twenty minutes each: the first from 0 degrees 00 minutes of Leo, the second from 3 degrees 20 minutes of Leo, the third from 6 degrees 40 minutes of Leo and the fourth from 10 degrees 00 minutes of Leo. 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 Magha 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.