The Saptami tithi

a birth on a Saptami tithi, in either fortnight

What the tradition reads

Saptami is the seventh of the fourteen shared tithi names, one of the three Bhadra tithis, a class myzodiaq.in reads as bringing clarity and order to the mind, favouring the start of a business, the signing of a contract, construction, education and travel, while cautioning against risky or impulsive undertakings on the same day. Clickastro.com names Lord Indra, king of the gods, as Saptami's ruling deity, and reports that the tithi favours the commencement of new activities generally, along with weddings, the purchase of a vehicle, moving into a new home, and the start of an exercise programme. Between the two readings Saptami emerges as a tithi of confident, well ordered beginnings, its Bhadra class supplying the discipline and its ruling deity supplying the boldness, a pairing the tradition reads as suited equally to a formal commercial start and to the more personal beginning of a new dwelling or a new physical discipline.

The story

Indra, the deity clickastro.com gives for Saptami, is described by Wikipedia as the Vedic god of weather and king of the devas, ruler of Svarga, and above all the god who defeated Vritra, the great serpent whose coils had blocked the world's rivers and withheld its rains. By killing Vritra, Indra restores rain and sunshine to a world that had gone without both, a rescue the Rigveda returns to more often than to any other single deed by any other god. Indra's own strength is described there as resting on his status as a god of order rather than of chaos, his violence directed only at what obstructs the world's ordinary flourishing. A tithi ruled by the deity who broke open the block on the world's own rivers fits naturally with Saptami's reading as a day for beginnings that need real force behind them, a new venture, a new home, a body newly put to disciplined use, each one a small rehearsal of Indra's own decisive opening of what had been closed.

Written from

Corpus key tithi:Saptami.