Pushya: the nourisher, the gist

Pushya: the nourisher

The eighth of the moon's 27 stations is a faint grey smudge in the dimmest constellation of the zodiac, and two sets of people who had never met both looked at it and saw a place where food is put out.

This is the short way in. The essay has the working, the sources and the sky.

No single star in that smudge is bright enough for your eye to catch on its own. You can see it at all only because about 1,000 of them are standing there together.

Two stars in the constellation of the Crab have been called the donkeys since Greek and Roman times. What they are eating from sits between them, and the Latin name for it is Praesepe, the manger. It is not a star. On a dark night it is a small grey patch, about three full moons wide, and it never sharpens up into points.

In India the same patch is Pushya, the eighth nakshatra. The name comes from a root meaning to nourish. So one side of the world called it a feeding trough and the other side called it the nourisher, with no contact between them.

The patch is a real crowd of stars. Roughly 1,000 of them, held together by their own gravity, about 600 light years away. Galileo pointed his new telescope at it in 1609 and counted 40. Binoculars will do the same for you.

You cannot see it in late July or early August, because the sun is sitting in that part of the sky. It comes back before dawn in the second half of September, and by late February it is almost overhead at ten at night. To find it, draw a line from Pollux in Gemini to Regulus in Leo. The patch sits a little short of halfway along.

The essay then takes the tradition on its own terms. Pushya is the station the handbooks call the most auspicious, recommended for almost anything a person might start, with one odd exception: marriage. Its presiding figure is Brihaspati, the priest and teacher of the gods, though the planet assigned to it is Saturn, the strict one.

What the station offers, the essay argues, is not a personality type but a subject: feeding. Who fed you, what it cost them, what you feed now, and whether the people you look after can ever refuse what you hand them. A manger, after all, is where you feed animals you intend to keep.

Words decoded

nakshatra: one of 27 slices of sky, one for roughly each night the moon takes to go round
Pushya (पुष्य): the eighth slice; the name means "the nourisher"
Praesepe: Latin for manger or feeding trough; the same star cluster is also called the Beehive, or M44
magnitude: the brightness scale astronomers use; it runs backwards, so magnitude 6 is fainter than magnitude 4, and about 6 is as faint as a good eye can go
light year: the distance light travels in a year, so a star 600 light years away is being seen as it was 600 years ago
meghavat (मेघवत्): "cloudy", the word old Indian star catalogues use for how this station looks
Brihaspati (बृहस्पति): the figure attached to this station; in the oldest hymns the priest and counsellor of the gods, later also the name for the planet Jupiter and for Thursday
muhurta: the branch of the tradition that picks times for starting things, such as a housewarming or a journey

Why anyone should careThe kindest-sounding label in the whole system turns out, when you go and look, to be a cloud you can barely see, hung with questions about who feeds whom and at what price. That is a much more useful thing to be handed than a compliment about your character.

Read it properly, 8 min Pushya: the nourisher