श्रवण
Śravaṇa Nakṣatra
Śravaṇa is the star of listening. Its name comes from the root śru, to hear, and means simply that which is heard. The Moon rules it, Viṣṇu presides over it in his Trivikrama form, and the power usually credited to it is saṃhanana, the binding of separate things into one connected whole.
At a Glance
No classical gotra association is attested for Shravana. Krittika, by contrast, carries a well-attested Angiras lineage. The absence here is a real gap in the tradition, not something later writers quietly filled in.
Etymology & Inner Logic of the Name
Shravana comes from the root √shru, to hear. The same root gives Hindu tradition its word for revealed scripture, shruti, which means that which is heard rather than that which was composed. That shared root places the nakshatra inside the oldest Indian account of how sacred knowledge moves, an account in which nothing important is read off a page or reasoned out alone, but received from a living voice along an unbroken line of teacher and student. The symbol makes the point without needing any argument. Other nakshatras take their symbols from instruments of doing, a bow, a plough, a sword, and Shravana takes its symbol from an organ that can only receive.
Its second symbol, the three footprints, ties that receptivity to Vishnu's three strides across the cosmos. Together the two symbols describe a sequence, not two separate ideas. Something is heard, and something considerable follows from having heard it. This is why the listening in this nakshatra is never merely passive. What a Shravana native takes in has a way of turning, in time, into action large enough to alter the shape of things around them.
The Older Name, Śroṇā
The star's older name is Shrona. The Taittiriya Brahmana and the Bhagavata Purana use it, while the Atharvaveda (19.7.4) already calls it Shravana. Monier-Williams gives shrona two senses: this star, and 'lame, limping', which is its sense in the Rigveda (1.112.8, quoted in the Texts tab).
The Taittiriya Brahmana explains the name with a different verb, ashlonat, which the grammarians gloss as 'heaped up, collected'. It gives the verb of hearing, ashrinot, to the next star, Shravishtha. Vic DiCara and Abhigya Anand both point to the 'lame' sense of the old name.
Dr Arjun Pai lists other names he has met in old texts. One of them, Ashvattha, is confirmed: Panini's grammar (4.2.5 and 4.2.22) uses it as a name of Shrona. In Tamil and Malayalam the star is Thiruvonam. Dr Pai notes that only one other star takes the honorific thiru, Ardra, which is Thiruvathirai.
The Shakti: Saṃhanana Prāpana
The Taittiriya Brahmana fixes a power formula for every nakshatra using the same paired scheme, and at TB 1.5.1 it gives Shravana its pair. The Basis Above is prichchamanah, the seeking or the questioning. The Basis Below is panthah, the paths. The sutra ends there and offers no separate word for what results. Samhanana, the name nearly every modern book gives to the resulting power, comes from David Frawley's reading of that pairing and not from the Brahmana itself. Check that before citing it as ancient.
Taken as a single image the pairing explains itself. A question goes out and travels along many different roads, and whatever those roads reach is eventually tied back together into something whole. Watch how a Shravana native actually works and you will see that pattern running: inquiry that fans out across people, places, texts and institutions, followed by the slower business of knitting what was found into a structure that holds.
A planet placed in Shravana is being asked to develop that competence. Originating alone is not what this placement is for. It should listen widely enough, and connect faithfully enough, that an order emerges which no single person could have built by themselves, and that the native becomes the point through which people and ideas that would never otherwise have met find each other.
Position in the Great Cycle
Shravana is the twenty-second nakshatra, and it opens the zodiac's final movement, the stretch running through Dhanishtha, Shatabhisha, the two Bhadrapadas and at last Revati, where everything dissolves. Its neighbour Uttarashadha, ruled by the Vishwadevas, establishes a victory meant to be permanent. Shravana comes directly afterwards and raises the question that victory cannot answer for itself, because an order which is never heard, never transmitted and never connected outward will harden into something closed, and closed things do not last.
The whole of Shravana falls inside Capricorn, Saturn's sign of structure, hierarchy and patient effort, and that containment does real work. The nakshatra's own nature is expansive and far-travelling, while Capricorn insists the expansion be earned in stages. Trivikrama's three strides were three separate and deliberate placements of a foot rather than one uncontrolled leap, and Capricorn holds the nakshatra to that same discipline.
Astronomical Identity
Shravana is identified with Altair, α Aquilae, together with its two fainter companions β and γ Aquilae. The three lie in a wide straight line across the sky, which has long made them a natural mnemonic for three steps or three footprints. They sit in the constellation the Greeks mapped as Aquila, the Eagle, and readers often notice the echo between that eagle and Garuda, Vishnu's own eagle-mount, though nothing links the two traditions beyond the coincidence. The junction star, the yogatara used in the classical siddhantas, is generally taken to be Altair itself.
Dr Aditya Togi, an astronomer on Dr Arjun Pai's panel, points out where Altair actually stands. Computed for this page (Lahiri, 2026), Altair is at Capricorn 7°55′. By longitude that is the last pada of Uttarashadha, inside the classical span of Abhijit, Capricorn 6°40′ to 10°53′20″. Altair also lies about 29° north of the ecliptic, far from the planets' path.
Altair, Vega and Deneb form the Summer Triangle. Altair spins very fast, about 286 km/s at its equator, once in under eight hours. Its equator is over 20% wider than its poles. In 2007 J. D. Monnier's team imaged its surface with the CHARA array, the first such image of an ordinary star other than the Sun.
A Note on Dāśā
In the Vimshottari system the Moon rules three nakshatras: Rohini, Hasta and Shravana. Anyone born with the Moon here therefore begins life inside its own Chandra Mahadasha, which runs ten years. What gets laid down in those years tends to become permanent — the habit of listening, the appetite for learning, the first shape of a reputation, the earliest threads of the network the person will spend a lifetime extending. Because Shravana is one of the Moon's own nakshatras, the dasha and the star reinforce each other instead of pulling in different directions.