The Shashthi tithi

a birth on a Shashthi tithi, in either fortnight

What the tradition reads

Shashthi is the sixth of the fourteen shared tithi names, one of the three Nanda tithis, the class myzodiaq.in reads as opening the heart to joy, social connection and creativity, favouring marriage, celebration, art and the purchase of anything meant to give pleasure, while advising against hard labour, confrontation, fasting or surgery on the same day. Clickastro.com names Lord Kartikeya, also given as Agni, as Shashthi's ruling deity, and reports that the tithi blesses immense happiness and prosperity, favouring investiture ceremonies, construction, real estate dealings and the wearing of new garments and jewellery, while marking it inauspicious for marriage and for oil massage of the body. The two readings agree closely on joy and prosperity even where they part on which specific ceremonies belong to the day, Shashthi's happiness expressed through festivity in one account and through the more settled satisfactions of property and adornment in the other.

The story

Kartikeya, the deity clickastro.com names for Shashthi, is born, in the Mahabharata's own telling, from Shiva's seed, spilled when the god's union with Parvati is interrupted and carried by Agni, the fire god, into the Ganges, where it is Agni's own heat, not the river's, that allows the seed to grow into a child at all. The Skanda Purana gives a separate account: six divine sparks separate from Shiva, becoming six infant boys raised together by the Krittikas, and it is from that shared upbringing that Kartikeya takes his very name, of the Krittikas, once Parvati draws the six infants back into a single six headed god. Whichever telling is followed, Kartikeya's purpose is single, to end the tyranny of the demon Tarakasura, who could be slain by no one but a son of Shiva, a destiny he fulfils by becoming commander of the divine armies. A tithi ruled by a god born specifically to secure victory and safety for the world fits Shashthi's reading as a day of blessing and prosperity, joy made possible because the danger it answers has already been met and settled.

Written from

Corpus key tithi:Shashthi.