The five limbs of a day

A day here is not one thing measured one way. It is five counters running at once, each on its own clock, each handing over at its own odd hour. The almanac reports where all five stood at sunrise, and when each changes.

First, the tithi, the lunar day. What it really measures is an angle: twelve degrees of the widening gap between sun and moon. Almost every fast and festival is pinned to a tithi rather than to a date. That is the entire reason they seem to wander against the English calendar. They are not wandering. You are watching them from a different sort of clock.

Second, the vara, the weekday, the only one of the five with nothing to do with the moon. Each day carries a planet as its owner, and behind that sits old bookkeeping. List the seven bodies people could see, slowest-seeming first: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, the moon. Now deal the day's twenty-four hours around that list, round and round. Whoever gets the first hour owns the day. Seven into twenty-four leaves three, so each new day opens three names further along, producing exactly the weekday order everybody uses. Those twenty-four shares are the horas.

Third, the nakshatra, the moon's station among the fixed stars. The moon's path is cut into twenty-seven patches and it crosses roughly one a night. This is the oldest named set of the five: such lists appear in Vedic texts long before the twelve zodiac signs reach India. It is used for naming a child, for marriage matching, and for choosing an hour.

Fourth and fifth, yoga and karana. Yoga adds the sun's position to the moon's and slices the total into twenty-seven parts. Karana is just half a tithi. Both are specialist tools; nobody who skips them has missed much.

Together the five give a complete address for a moment, the way a train needs a line, a number and a platform. And all five describe. They say where the moon stands. They do not say what will happen inside your day.