Uttara Ashadha

Uttara Ashadha is the twenty-first nakshatra, straddling the Sagittarius-Capricorn boundary from 266 degrees 40 minutes to 280 degrees of the sidereal zodiac. Its Vimshottari ruler is the Sun, its presiding deities are the Vishvadevas, the collective universal gods, and its symbol is an elephant's tusk or a set of planks. The name means the later invincible one. Where Purva Ashadha carries early, forceful victory, Uttara Ashadha carries the final, lasting kind, the win that holds because it rests on righteous foundations and collective support. Jyotisha classes it as Manushya gana and reads it as a mansion of enduring achievement and integrity. These are traditional interpretations laid over the Sagittarius-Capricorn border stars that Indian astronomy counts at this point.

Uttara Ashadha's padas fall in Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer. The Vishvadevas, the collective universal gods, are a Vedic category rather than a fixed roster of specific named deities, sometimes listed as ten, sometimes differently, and their presidency over this mansion, in contrast to Purva Ashadha's more elemental Waters, is read by jyotishis as consistent with Uttara Ashadha's own theme of victory achieved through collective and righteous support rather than through the water's raw unstoppable force alone. The mansion also carries the traditional designation of holding the Abhijit point in its final degrees in certain older reckonings, the extra twenty-eighth mansion of the archaic count, associated with the bright star Vega, a survival of the older twenty-eight-fold scheme embedded within the standard twenty-seven-mansion sequence rather than fully excised from it.

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. Uttara Ashadha runs from 266 degrees 40 minutes to 280 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 Sagittarius, the second from 0 degrees 00 minutes of Capricorn, the third from 3 degrees 20 minutes of Capricorn and the fourth from 6 degrees 40 minutes of Capricorn. 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 Uttara Ashadha 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.