Punarvasu

Punarvasu is the seventh nakshatra, straddling the Gemini-Cancer boundary from 80 to 93 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac, near the twin stars Castor and Pollux. Its Vimshottari ruler is Jupiter, its presiding deity is Aditi, mother of the gods and goddess of boundless space, and its symbol is a bow and quiver. The name means the return of the good or the light again, puna meaning again, and jyotisha reads it as a mansion of renewal, safe return, and replenishment after the storm of Ardra. It is classed as Deva gana. Aditi's association gives it an expansive, sheltering, abundant quality that suits its Jupiter rulership. These are interpretive conventions of the tradition, laid over the region of the Gemini twins that Indian astronomy counts in this segment.

Punarvasu's padas fall in Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. Aditi, mother of the Adityas, is one of the oldest deities named in the Rigveda, invoked there as boundless freedom itself, and her presence as presiding deity gives Punarvasu a claim to genuine antiquity within the nakshatra scheme distinct from later Puranic accretions found in some other mansions. The mansion is unusual in straddling not just two signs but two very different classical readings of the Gemini-Cancer boundary, since Punarvasu belongs mostly to Gemini's airy, communicative nature in its earlier degrees before crossing into Cancer's nurturing water in its last pada, a shift jyotishis read as the mansion itself enacting its own theme of return and transition.

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. Punarvasu runs from 80 degrees 00 minutes to 93 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 Gemini, the second from 23 degrees 20 minutes of Gemini, the third from 26 degrees 40 minutes of Gemini and the fourth from 0 degrees 00 minutes of Cancer. 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 Punarvasu 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.