The Chaturdashi tithi

a birth on a Chaturdashi tithi, in either fortnight

What the tradition reads

Chaturdashi is the fourteenth and last of the shared tithi names, closing both fortnights of the lunar month before either Purnima or Amavasya follows. Clickastro.com names the goddess Kali as its ruling deity and classes it among the three Rikta tithis, a class myzodiaq.in reads as withdrawn and unfavourable for marriage, business or travel undertaken for gain, better suited to meditation, fasting and spiritual practice. Clickastro.com's own reading agrees that Chaturdashi is not considered good for auspicious activity, and limits its favour to routine activity and the reading of scripture. The Krishna paksha Chaturdashi in particular, falling the day before Amavasya in the month of Ashvin, is separately marked in the wider tradition as Naraka Chaturdashi, or Kali Chaudas, a day set apart for the ritual defeat of darkness rather than for celebration in the ordinary sense.

The story

Naraka Chaturdashi commemorates the killing of the demon Narakasura by Krishna together with his wife Satyabhama, an event Wikipedia's article places specifically on the fourteenth day of the dark fortnight of Ashvin, the same Chaturdashi that closes the wider tithi cycle. The demon's very name is built from words meaning man and unhappiness, so that his defeat reads as more than a single battle won, a clearing away of a whole class of suffering he was made to represent. The festival built around the day, Kali Chaudas, is described as a day to abolish laziness and evil and to invite light and positive energy in their place, a personal, yearly rehearsal of the same victory Krishna won once. A tithi ruled by Kali, herself a goddess called on to end what ordinary means cannot, and marked in living practice by the story of a demon's defeat on this very date, gives Chaturdashi's otherwise withdrawn, Rikta character a clear purpose: not a day for beginning anything, but the day set aside for clearing out whatever darkness has been allowed to gather.

Written from

Corpus key tithi:Chaturdashi.