The Amavasya tithi

a birth on the Amavasya tithi, the new moon that closes the dark fortnight and falls in that fortnight alone

What the tradition reads

Amavasya is the new moon, the fifteenth tithi of the dark fortnight and, unlike the fourteen tithi names before it, unique to that fortnight rather than shared with the waxing half of the month. Clickastro.com names the Vishvadevas, a group of gods, as Amavasya's ruling deity and classes it, together with Purnima, among the three Purna tithis, a class myzodiaq.in reads as a span of completion and wholeness, though the tradition treats the new moon itself as inauspicious for most ordinary activity, its favour reserved instead for religious worship, charity and the rites performed for the souls of the departed. This last use is the tithi's most consistent thread across the sources: whatever else a Purna tithi elsewhere favours, Amavasya's own completion is read as belonging to the ancestors rather than to any new undertaking of the living.

The story

The clearest story behind Amavasya's association with the departed lies in Pitru Paksha, the sixteen day period ending on Sarva Pitru Amavasya, also called Mahalaya, when Hindus perform shraddha, the ritual offering to their ancestors, who are held to dwell in Pitriloka, a realm between heaven and earth. The Markandeya Purana promises that ancestors content with the shraddha offered them will grant health, wealth, knowledge, longevity and eventually moksha in return. The tradition's own explanation for why this obligation exists at all is told through Karna, the generous warrior of the Mahabharata, who gave away gold his whole life but never once fed his ancestors through shraddha, and who found himself starving in the afterlife as a result, food offered him there turning to gold he could not eat; granted fifteen days back on earth to correct the omission, he established the observance that Amavasya, as the day even those who forgot all year may still perform it, keeps alive. Amavasya's darkness, in this telling, is not emptiness but an open door back toward those who came before.

Written from

Corpus key tithi:Amavasya.