Mrigashira: the head that keeps turning

The essay follows that order. Rohini, the orange star, is up first. A little after two in the morning comes a small blunt triangle almost nobody looks at. Twenty minutes behind it, the three stars of Orion's belt. And at 4:15, last of all, Sirius. The triangle is the subject: Mrigashira, the deer's head.

You cannot get it from a city terrace. The brightest of its three stars is magnitude 3.4. Magnitude is a backwards scale for brightness: the bigger the number, the fainter the star. Most city skies stop at about that point, and the other two stars are fainter still. So you go past the last streetlight, to a school ground or a dark field with a clear view east.

Finding it is easy once you know the trick, and the trick starts with the bright things, because your eye collects these four in the reverse of the order they rose in. Face east and look low and to your right for three bright stars in a short straight row. That is the belt of Orion. Up and to the left of the belt are two bright stars, and the lower left one is clearly orange. That is Betelgeuse. Go straight up from Betelgeuse by half a fist held at arm's length. The small blunt triangle that comes out of the dark is Mrigashira.

The name means the deer's head. Mriga means deer, and from it comes a verb that means to hunt, to chase, to look for, to search. The word marga, the marg on your street sign, is built from the same word on the standard reading: first a deer track, then any track, then a road, then a method.

There is an old story attached. Prajapati took the form of a stag to chase his own daughter, the gods made Rudra to stop him, and Rudra shot him with an arrow. Then the whole scene was set in the sky. The stag is Orion, his head is this triangle, the arrow is the belt, the hunter is the star Sirius, and the doe is Rohini.

Handbooks call this the station of searching. The essay will not turn that into a verdict about anybody's character. It offers questions instead: what am I actually looking for, would I know it if it stood in front of me, and how much of the looking do I enjoy for its own sake.