The rat

the rat yoni, male and female, assigned to the Magha and Purva Phalguni nakshatras in the matching tradition

What the tradition reads

The rat is one of fourteen animals the yoni scheme assigns across the twenty seven nakshatras, appearing as the male animal of Magha and as the female animal of Purva Phalguni. Read for a single chart, a rat native is described in the tradition as quick, resourceful and adaptable, an animal the scheme reads as small enough to be underestimated and clever enough to turn that underestimation to its own advantage. In the matching test, the rat's one recorded enemy in the standard table of seven pairs is the cat, the same plain predator and prey relationship named from the opposite side, and the pairing is scored at the bottom of the range. Against every other animal, the rat is read as neither an enemy nor a marked friend, and the published tables do not agree precisely on how the remaining relationships should be graded, so a careful reading records only the confirmed enemy pairing rather than a tier the sources do not settle between them.

The story

The rat, or mouse, mushika, serves as the vahana of Ganesha, the elephant headed god, an unlikely pairing of the largest headed and one of the smallest bodied animals in the whole Hindu pantheon of mounts. Later commentary reads the mouse in more than one way at once, as a symbol of the destructive desires and impulses a person must learn to master, as an image of the obstacles, vighna, that Ganesha himself is invoked to remove, since a rat left unchecked can ruin a whole granary, and as a sign of Ganesha's own ability to reach into even the smallest and most hidden of places. The rat only began appearing as Ganesha's principal mount in sculpture around the seventh century, considerably later than the god's own established worship, a small animal quietly attached to a much older and much larger one. That the yoni scheme should read its rat natives as clever and adaptable rather than merely troublesome fits this same later reading, a creature small enough to go almost anywhere and resourceful enough to matter wherever it goes.

Written from

Corpus key yoni:rat.