Mula

Mula is the nineteenth nakshatra, from 240 to 253 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac at the start of Sagittarius, in the direction of the galactic centre. Its Vimshottari ruler is Ketu, its presiding deity is Nirriti, goddess of dissolution, calamity, and the ground beneath, and its symbol is a bunch of tied roots. The name means root or origin. Jyotisha reads Mula through Nirriti's theme of getting to the root by tearing things up, destruction that reaches the foundation, investigation that will not stop at the surface, and classes it as Rakshasa gana. It is regarded as a searching, uprooting mansion, difficult but foundational. These attributions are interpretive conventions of the tradition; the segment lies toward the dense star-fields of the galactic centre that Indian astronomy counts here.

Mula's padas fall in Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. Nirriti appears in the Rigveda chiefly as a goddess to be warded off, invoked in hymns asking for release from her domain of misfortune and dissolution rather than praised in the manner of most Vedic deities, which makes her presidency over a nakshatra unusual; some later texts identify her instead with Kali or with the earth goddess in a destructive aspect, softening the purely negative Rigvedic picture. The mansion's location toward the galactic centre was unknown to the tradition that named it, yet the reading of Mula as the point where investigation will not stop at the surface has struck some modern popular writers as an apt coincidence with the astronomical fact of a supermassive black hole lying in the same direction, a resonance worth noting as coincidence rather than claiming as intentional in the classical sources.

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. Mula runs from 240 degrees 00 minutes to 253 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 Sagittarius, the second from 3 degrees 20 minutes of Sagittarius, the third from 6 degrees 40 minutes of Sagittarius and the fourth from 10 degrees 00 minutes of Sagittarius. 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 Mula 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.