Kṛttikā Nakṣatra

At a Glance

Etymology & Inner Logic of the Name

The name Krittika comes from the root √krit, to cut, to sever, to divide cleanly. The raw new energy of the cycle's first two stars is, here, finally cut into shape: refined, and made fit to offer. The cut is not destruction for its own sake. It is the surgeon's cut, or the priest's: the excess and the false are taken off, so that what is left can stand in fire without being burned up.

The word also names the cluster itself, the cutters, a group of stars pictured as a blade. An older reading pictures them as a bunch of blossoms instead, since the name sits close to words for a bouquet. Both come to the same thing: something gathered, bound tight, and sharp at the edge.

The Shakti: Dahana

Krittika's power is dahana, burning that purifies. The old sutra sets it out in three parts: heat above, light below, and burning as the result. In a life it runs the same way each time. Heat builds unseen, a light falls on what was hidden, and something gets burned off, so the person stands cleaner afterward than before.

The fire does not destroy the person. It destroys what is stuck to the person. Those who fight it feel it as loss, shame, or illness. Those who work with it, who put the false self into the flame themselves, come out as the clear and self-possessed people a Sun-ruled, Agni-governed star was always pointing them toward.

Position in the Great Cycle

Krittika is the third star of the first cycle, after Ashwini's spark and Bharani's gestation. Here the new life of those two is tempered and held to account, cut down to its true shape before it is allowed to grow on. The star is unusual in sitting across two signs. Its first pada finishes Aries. Its other three open Taurus. So it stands on the hinge between cardinal fire and fixed earth, between the push of Mars's sign and the settled, sensual patience of Venus's.

Aditya, on Dr Arjun Pai's panel, reads the star through the two houses it touches. When the zodiac is laid over the body, Aries is the first house: the head and the self. Taurus is the second: the face, the mouth, food, family and money. One pada of Krittika sits in the first house and three in the second. Its themes keep coming back to the body and to what the body takes in: appetite, speech and the family table.

Astronomical Identity

Krittika is the Pleiades, the open cluster Messier 45 in Taurus. It is one of the closest and most striking clusters to Earth, counted by tradition as six or sometimes seven visible stars, the brightest of which is Alcyone. The Surya Siddhanta's tables name Alcyone as the cluster's junction star. In antiquity the Pleiades rose near the spring equinox, and the Shatapatha Brahmana records that they do not move off from the eastern quarter the way other stars do. That fixed eastern rising is why the earliest household fires were lit under them, and why the oldest Vedic lists put Krittika first.

Aditya is an astronomer as well as an astrologer, and he adds what the telescope shows. The Pleiades are a young cluster, about a hundred million years old, made of hot blue stars still wrapped in a faint dust cloud that reflects their light. Alcyone sits at Taurus 6°08′ in the sidereal zodiac, inside the third pada. The spring equinox stood in Krittika from about 2600 to 1600 BCE, and that is the age when the Vedic lists began with this star.

Vic DiCara draws a lesson from the same fact. The old lists start with Krittika because the equinox stood there, not because of anything in the star itself. So he reads each nakshatra through its god and not through the planet that later systems put in charge of it. His gloss on the god's name fits the star well. Agni is the one who goes first, like the torch carried at the front of a procession so that everyone behind can see.