Anuradha

a Moon, Ascendant or other key point in Anuradha, the seventeenth lunar mansion

What the tradition reads

Anuradha is the seventeenth of the twenty seven lunar mansions, occupying the middle portion of Scorpio in the sidereal zodiac. Its ruling planet is Saturn, its symbol a triumphal archway, and its presiding deity is Mitra, guardian of friendship and of sworn agreement. A Moon, Ascendant or other significant point placed here is read as giving a keen analytical mind, a native able to see through pretence and gauge a situation as it actually stands rather than as it is presented. The tradition describes Anuradha natives as sociable in general company while remaining carefully guarded about their own private affairs, offering that access only to a chosen few, and as people who are moved above all by reason, resistant to appeals made purely to feeling. Their natural gift for bridging differences and easing hostility between others is read as flowing from the same balanced, harmony seeking temperament, a leadership that persuades rather than commands. Where the placement is weaker, the tradition reads the same guardedness as excessive secrecy, and adds a tendency toward mood swings or idleness when the rest of the chart does not support Anuradha's usual steadiness.

The story

Mitra's name, from an old root meaning that which binds, marks him from the earliest texts as the guardian of treaties and of sworn obligation, a role already recorded in a Mitanni inscription from the fourteenth century BCE naming him among the protectors of a treaty between kingdoms. In later tradition his role softened from binding oath to binding affection, and mitra became, in most languages descended from Sanskrit, simply the ordinary word for friend, a god the tradition also credits with abhorring violence even where violence might otherwise be considered sacred. He is inseparable in the Rigveda from Varuna, the two together called Mitra Varuna and read as joint guardians of rta, the cosmic and moral order, Mitra standing for the dawn and the visible light of agreement, Varuna for the night and its stricter enforcement. A mansion symbolised by an archway, built to be walked through by two parties meeting rather than to keep them apart, reads Anuradha's gift for bridging enmity as inherited directly from a god whose entire history moves from binding contract toward binding friendship.

Written from

Corpus key nakshatra:Anuradha.