The tiger

the tiger yoni, male and female, assigned to the Vishakha and Chitra nakshatras in the matching tradition

What the tradition reads

The tiger is one of fourteen animals the yoni test assigns across the twenty seven lunar mansions, appearing as the male animal of Vishakha and as the female animal of Chitra. Read for a single chart, a tiger native is described in the tradition as fierce, private and solitary by preference, comfortable with its own company, quick to defend its territory, and reluctant to be hurried into anything, whether affection or confrontation, on a timetable set by somebody else. In the matching test, the tiger's compatibility with a partner's animal is read by the fixed table of fourteen animals and their seven traditional enemy pairs, horse and buffalo, elephant and lion, sheep and monkey, serpent and mongoose, dog and deer, cat and rat, and cow and tiger. The cow is the tiger's one recorded enemy, a pairing read as a predator matched with the animal it is traditionally imagined to hunt, and scored at the bottom of the range. Against every animal not on that list, including the monkey, the tiger is read as neither a natural enemy nor an especially easy match, a workable neutrality the published tables do not agree on scoring precisely, rather than either a warm friendship or open hostility.

The story

The tiger's place in Hindu myth is shared, rather than held alone, with the lion as a mount of Durga, the warrior goddess: Durga's own account describes her riding a lion or a tiger, with many arms and a weapon in each, a creature of restrained, dangerous power lent entirely to the goddess's own service. Where gentler animals in the yoni table, the cow, the deer, the sheep, describe a temperament content to be led, the tiger describes one that leads itself, comfortable serving a power greater than its own only on the rare occasions, like Durga's own battles, when it chooses to. That it should be scored an outright enemy only to the cow, the animal most associated in the same literature with nourishment, patience and being given rather than taking, completes a simple picture, the tiger's single true incompatibility, in this scheme, is with the one creature built entirely around the opposite instinct to its own.

Written from

Corpus key yoni:tiger.