Krishna Navami

Krishna Navami is the twenty-fourth tithi overall, the ninth day of the waning fortnight, sharing the character of the ninth tithi and its dedication to the goddess Durga. In the fivefold grouping it is a Rikta tithi, generally reckoned unfavourable for new undertakings. The waning Moon is now past its last quarter, a thinning crescent rising before dawn. While the great Navami festivals fall in the bright fortnight, the ninth tithi of the dark half carries the Goddess associations too. These are the conventions of the calendar tradition, which reads each tithi through both its fixed number-character and the waxing or waning of the Moon in the fortnight where it falls.

The waning ninth's Durga association, carried over from the bright-fortnight Navami that closes Navaratri, has no major public festival attached to it in most regional calendars, and its significance in the panchanga is largely confined to its place in the fivefold classification as a Rikta tithi, generally counselled against for new undertakings, a caution applied here with no countervailing festival to override it, unlike the bright Navami where Rama Navami and the close of Navaratri routinely take precedence over the tithi's default caution.

Behind the observance sits a piece of arithmetic. A tithi is the time the Moon takes to open a further twelve degrees of separation from the Sun. Krishna Navami occupies the arc from 276 to 288 degrees of that separation. Since lunar motion quickens and slackens across the month, the arc is crossed in as little as about nineteen hours or as much as about twenty six. The panchanga settles the mismatch by naming each civil day for the tithi in force at its sunrise. A tithi shorter than the interval between two sunrises can therefore be skipped entirely, which the tradition calls a kshaya tithi, and one longer than that interval can carry its name over two civil days, an adhika or vriddhi tithi. Both occur in the ordinary course of a year, and both are why an observance can appear on two dates in the same almanac.

Each tithi is halved again, and each half carries a karana, so the first half of Krishna Navami carries Taitila, the fourth, and the second Gara, the fifth. Seven of the eleven karanas repeat, cycling eight times through the month, while four are fixed to particular half tithis at the month's opening and close.

The Moon is waning through this arc, rising later each night and showing about 40 per cent of the disc lit. The phase follows from the elongation and not the other way round, so the tithi and the shape of the disc are two readings of one measurement.