Sunday, Ravivara

a birth falling on a Sunday

What the tradition reads

Vara, the weekday, is one of the five limbs of the panchanga alongside tithi, nakshatra, karana and nitya yoga, and each of the seven varas is named for and ruled by one of the seven classical planets. Sunday, Ravivara or Aadivaar in Sanskrit, is ruled by Surya, the Sun, and its ruling deity is given as Aditya, the Sun god himself. Astrosurkhiyan's tradition assigns the day the quality of sattva and reads it as a day of life, of integrity and of pure consciousness, favouring individual pursuits, matters of fatherhood, and undertakings that call for courage, along with work involving nature, gold or trees, while cautioning the native to master anger and ego rather than let the day's own vitality tip into either. The Surya Siddhanta itself, cited by Wikipedia's article on vara, reckons the lord of each day by a rule of succession through the planetary horas, and Sunday's own hora sequence, Sun first among Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon, is what fixes the Sun as this day's own name and lord.

The story

Surya's iconography, as Wikipedia's article describes it, shows him riding a chariot drawn by seven horses, a number read as standing both for the seven colours of visible light and for the seven days of the week that Sunday itself opens, each horse carrying one of the seven metres of Sanskrit prosody as its own name. Aruna, his charioteer, sits before him, guiding the chariot across the sky. Surya's marriage to Sanjna carries its own difficult turn: unable to bear her husband's full radiance, Sanjna creates a double of herself, Chhaya, and sends her to stand in as Surya's wife in her place, a substitution that will later produce, among Surya's several children, some of the tradition's most consequential figures, including Yama and Shani. A day named for a god who carries within his own myth the very number of the week, and whose light was once too much even for his own wife to bear directly, fits Sunday's reading as a day of vitality strong enough to need its own restraint.

Written from

Corpus key vara:Sunday.