Nakshatra files · The gist
Hasta: five stars make a hand
The thirteenth of the moon's twenty-seven stations is a small four-cornered box of stars that almost anybody can find, the tradition calls it the hand, and the essay hangs one made thing on each of its five stars.
This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.
The stars belong to a small constellation the West calls Corvus, the crow. Four of them sit at the corners of a four-sided figure about seven degrees wide. Hold your closed fist out at the end of a straight arm and it covers the whole thing with room left over.
Most star patterns need imagination: somebody has to talk you into the bear or the hunter. This one is just a box.
The fifth star, Alchiba, is much fainter and sits a little below and to the right of the box. From a city you may not see it at all. It is also the closest of the five to us, about forty-nine light years away.
In India these five stars are Hasta, and the name simply means hand. The same word became haath in Hindi. It is also a length: the distance from your elbow to the tip of your middle finger, which is how people measured before rulers existed.
The essay is built around five made things, one for each star: a thread, a pot, a knot, a kite, and a measure. That pairing is the writer's own invention, and she says so.
The presiding figure is Savitr, an old Vedic form of the sun. His name comes from a verb meaning to set something in motion, and the Gayatri, the most repeated verse in the country, is addressed to him. The Rigveda also calls him golden-handed.
The tradition attaches skill and craft to this station. The essay refuses to turn that into a compliment about anybody's personality. Skill is not something you are born with, it argues. It is a record of hours, and everybody who has one can name who taught them.
Corvus is a spring evening object, best due south around nine at night in the middle of May, and any clear evening from March through June will do. Start from Spica, the one bright white star in that part of the sky, and look a little under two fists to its right and slightly down.
Words decoded
- nakshatra (नक्षत्र)
- one of twenty-seven slices of sky, one for roughly each night the moon takes to go all the way round
- Hasta (हस्त)
- the thirteenth slice; the word means "hand", and also a length measured from elbow to fingertip
- Corvus
- the small constellation the West calls the crow; its four brightest stars make the box this essay is about
- magnitude
- the brightness scale astronomers use; it runs backwards, so a star of magnitude 4 is fainter than one of magnitude 2.6
- light year
- the distance light travels in a year, so a star fifty light years off is being seen as it was fifty years ago
- double star
- two stars so close together in the sky that they look like one point until you put a telescope on them
- Savitr (सवितृ)
- the figure attached to this station; a Vedic form of the sun, named for the power of setting things going
- Gayatri
- the short verse recited daily by many people in India; it is addressed to Savitr and asks him to set our thoughts moving
- Spica
- the brightest star in the constellation Virgo, called Chitra in the Indian list, and the signpost for finding Corvus
Twice a week
Essays like this one, Tuesdays and Saturdays. One email per essay, and the archive is never mailed out. Subscriptions open shortly; the RSS feed is live now.
Nothing else arrives, ever.