Swati

Swati is the fifteenth nakshatra, from 186 degrees 40 minutes to 200 degrees of the sidereal zodiac in Libra, and its star is Arcturus. Its Vimshottari ruler is Rahu, its presiding deity is Vayu, the wind-god, and its symbol is a young shoot swaying in the breeze, or in some lists a piece of coral. The name is glossed as the independent or self-going one. Jyotisha reads Swati through Vayu's air: independence, movement, flexibility, and the scattering, dispersing quality of wind, also trade, since goods move on the wind. It is classed as Deva gana. The swaying shoot gives it a theme of resilient, adaptable growth. These attributions are the tradition's interpretive layer over Arcturus, the bright northern star that Indian astronomy counts in this segment.

Swati's padas fall in Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer. Vayu ranks among the more senior deities of the Vedic pantheon, closely associated with Indra and later identified in some traditions as the father of both Hanuman and Bhima, giving the wind-god's presence as presiding deity a heroic pedigree beyond the elemental force itself. Arcturus, unusually for a nakshatra star, lies well off the ecliptic to the north, which some historians of Indian astronomy take as evidence that the mansion was originally defined by a less prominent star nearer the Moon's actual path and only later associated with the far brighter Arcturus by proximity, though this remains an inference rather than a documented textual claim.

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. Swati runs from 186 degrees 40 minutes to 200 degrees 00 minutes of the sidereal circle, and its four padas are three degrees twenty minutes each: the first from 6 degrees 40 minutes of Libra, the second from 10 degrees 00 minutes of Libra, the third from 13 degrees 20 minutes of Libra and the fourth from 16 degrees 40 minutes of Libra. 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 Swati 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.