Atiganda

Atiganda is the sixth nityayoga, and its name means great danger or a serious obstacle. It is one of the inauspicious yogas, indeed among the more strongly cautioned against in the panchanga, held unfavourable for beginning important undertakings, journeys, or ceremonies. Reckoned like the others from the summed longitude of Sun and Moon divided into twenty-seven parts, it takes its turn as the lights separate through the month. In selecting an auspicious muhurta an astrologer avoids the malefic yogas, and Atiganda is one that the tradition marks for particular avoidance. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, which fixes the favourable or unfavourable character of each of the twenty-seven yogas; the astronomical basis is only the combined motion of Sun and Moon.

Atiganda combines the intensifying prefix ati, exceeding or beyond, with ganda, itself the name of the tenth nityayoga and meaning a knot or an obstacle, so that Atiganda's own name literally signals an obstacle beyond the ordinary Ganda, a great or excessive impediment rather than merely a knot to be worked loose. This kind of intensified pairing, one yoga's name built from another's with an added qualifier, is not repeated elsewhere among the twenty-seven, which otherwise draw on twenty-seven largely independent words rather than on a smaller root vocabulary combined and recombined, making the Ganda-Atiganda pair a linguistic outlier within the set worth noting on its own account.

A yoga is arrived at by addition, which sets it apart from every other reckoning in the almanac. Where the tithi measures the Moon's separation FROM the Sun, the yoga measures the two longitudes ADDED together, and cuts the resulting circle into twenty seven equal arcs of thirteen degrees twenty minutes. Atiganda is the arc from 66 degrees 40 minutes to 80 degrees 00 minutes of that sum. The sum climbs at roughly fourteen degrees ten minutes a day, so a yoga runs about twenty two and a half hours on average, a little shorter than a tithi, and like a tithi it can be skipped between two sunrises or carried across two of them.

The twenty seven arcs are the same width as the twenty seven nakshatras, and Atiganda is the sixth arc of the grid in both schemes, which is why the two are often tabulated side by side. They are not the same thing and share nothing but their arithmetic: a nakshatra is a segment of the sky the Moon is physically standing in, while a yoga is a number derived from two positions and belongs to no part of the sky at all. Reading a yoga as a star group is the commonest confusion the term invites, and the shared name of the sixth position, Ardra, is where it usually starts.

Atiganda sits among the nine yogas classed as unfavourable. Nine of twenty seven is a third of the cycle, so an inauspicious yoga is a common event rather than a rare one, and the muhurta literature treats it accordingly: it weighs against a time without ruling it out, and is routinely overridden where the tithi, the nakshatra and the weekday agree.