मृगशिर
Mṛgaśira Nakṣatra
Mṛgaśira is the deer's head, and the fifth of the twenty-seven. Mars rules it, and Soma presides, who is both the pressed plant and the Moon. Varāhamihira puts it in the soft class and gives it the eyes of the cosmic body. Its own name comes from an animal that lifts its head, listens, and moves on.
The Star
Mrigashira runs from 23°20′ Taurus to 6°40′ Gemini, which means it does not sit in one sign. Two of its quarters are Venus's and two are Mercury's, and the cut falls exactly between them. Nine of the twenty-seven straddle a sign boundary this way; only three are divided as evenly as this one. Varahamihira states it twice, once from each side, when he builds the signs out of the stars.
In the sky it is the faint triangle at the head of Orion: three modest stars above the belt, where the hunter's face would be. The Indian eye did not see a hunter there. It saw the head of the animal, and it put the hunter in the next constellation along.
Aditya, the astronomer on Dr Arjun Pai's panel, learned the sky through this constellation. The junction star is Meissa, at Taurus 29°51′ in the sidereal zodiac. Just below Orion's belt lies the Orion Nebula, a cloud where new stars are still forming. Aditya studies it for a living and sees in it the star's theme of family and new life. Joni Patry points to Bellatrix in Orion's shoulder, at Taurus 27°05′, and calls it a female warrior's star. The spring equinox stood in Mrigashira between about 4500 and 3500 BCE.
Attributes
Three values in that table are given by the tables and by nothing older. No classical text assigns this star a tattva; Earth is Taurus's element, and half the star is not in Taurus. The direction rests on the same tables. Brihat Samhita 32.8 does place the star in a Circle of Wind. That chapter is reading earthquakes, not assigning elements, and this star's nadi is Madhya, not Vata. The wind circle settles nothing here.
What the Star Is For
The oldest hymn that names it asks it for one thing. The Atharvaveda's list of the twenty-seven gives each star a word, and Mrigashiras gets bhadra — blessed, kindly, good. Varahamihira, a thousand years or so later, is just as gentle. He puts it in the soft class, fit for friendship, for the rites of love, for clothes and ornaments and for singing at a happy occasion. He allows marriage on it. He allows the tonsure on it. In the chapter where torn cloth foretells a death under the next star along, this one foretells a mouse.
The severity people expect from it comes from somewhere else. Mars rules it, and the myth attached to the star is a hunt that ends with an arrow. Neither of those is in the classical judgement of what the star is good for, and the gap between them is worth holding on to while reading the rest.
Most teachers give the star one word: searching. Joni Patry, Kapiel Raaj, Sunil John and Dr Arjun Pai all call it the searching star, the deer moving through the forest in search of food. Vic DiCara thinks the word is overused. The name, he says, comes from the grazing animal that keeps its nose to the ground. The oldest text, the Brahmana's line for this star, speaks of spreading out and weaving together. In his reading the deer's beauty matters more than its search.