Monday, Somavara

a birth falling on a Monday

What the tradition reads

Monday, Somavara, is the second of the seven varas and is ruled by Chandra, the Moon, with the same deity, Chandra, given as its presiding god. Astrosurkhiyan's tradition assigns the day the quality of sattva, the same quality given to Sunday, and reads Somavara as supporting creativity, original thinking and intuitive matters, favouring marriage, family concerns and anything connected to a mother, along with shopping and decisions made by feeling rather than by calculation, while advising against cutting hair or having a manicure on the day. The Surya Siddhanta's rule for reckoning each day's lord, the same principle Wikipedia's article on vara sets out for the whole system, places the Moon second in the sequence of seven hora lords that runs Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, so that Monday's own name follows directly from where Chandra falls in that fixed order of succession.

The story

Post Vedic texts, as Wikipedia's article on Chandra records, give the Moon a settled parentage as the son of the sage Atri and his wife Anasuya, a gentler origin than several of the other classical grahas receive. Chandra's own crisis comes later, once grown: married to all twenty seven daughters of the sage Daksha, who personify the lunar mansions, he favours Rohini above the rest, and when Daksha's repeated warnings go unheeded the sage curses him with a wasting sickness. Only the intervention of the other gods softens the sentence, letting Chandra recover for half of each month through ritual bathing, an arrangement the tradition reads as the very origin of the Moon's own waxing and waning. A day named for a deity whose light itself is not constant but rises and falls on a fixed, negotiated cycle fits Somavara's reading as a day tuned to feeling and to the shifting, private currents of the mind rather than to anything fixed or unchanging.

Written from

Corpus key vara:Monday.