The Panchami tithi

a birth on a Panchami tithi, in either fortnight

What the tradition reads

Panchami is the fifth of the fourteen shared tithi names, marking the fifth day of either fortnight of the lunar month. Clickastro.com names the Moon itself as Panchami's ruling deity and classes it among the three Purna tithis, which myzodiaq.in reads as a tithi of satisfaction and wholeness, favoured for finishing a project, for religious ceremony, housewarming and the publishing of completed work, while cautioning against destructive acts or risky new ventures on the same day. Clickastro.com's own reading turns instead to healing, naming Panchami favourable for medical activity such as administering medicine, removing poison, performing surgery and marriage, while warning that it is an inauspicious day to lend money, since the lender may incur a loss. Panchami sits in the tradition, then, as a tithi of completion read two ways at once, the Purna class's fullness on one hand and, on the deity's own account, the delicate, exacting work of restoring a body to health on the other.

The story

The Moon, Chandra, the deity clickastro.com gives for Panchami, is placed by post Vedic texts as the son of the sage Atri and his wife Anasuya, a gentler and more settled parentage than the disputed births given to several of the other classical grahas. Wikipedia's account nonetheless gives Chandra his own crisis: married to all twenty seven daughters of the sage Daksha, who personify the lunar mansions, Chandra favoured Rohini above the rest, and when Daksha's warnings went unheeded the sage cursed him with a wasting sickness. Only when the other gods intervened did Daksha soften the curse, letting Chandra recover for half of every month by bathing in a sacred ford, an arrangement the tradition reads as the origin of the Moon's own waxing and waning. A deity whose own body was once healed by negotiated mercy, and who to this day carries that healing and its relapse in his monthly cycle, fits closely with Panchami's reading as the tithi given over to medicine, to the deliberate mending of what illness or poison has done to a body.

Written from

Corpus key tithi:Panchami.