Hi Ernst,
I have been wondering about Brihaspati. We have the planets in pairs of male and female archetypes as Sun-Moon and Mars-Venus. The pair of planets Mercury-Saturn are androgynous. Jupiter, the generous giving male planet, is the only one who doesn’t seem to have a pair.
I found it odd that there was no mention of Brihaspati’s wife, Tara, in astrology, especially since a wife is needed in all rituals. Then I remembered that in mythology, Tara falls in love with Chandra. Tara means stars. So, now I am wondering if the Lunar Mansions, as one, is actually Brihaspati’s wife. It makes sense when we compare the amount of time the Chandra spends with each of them, effectively becoming the lover, whereas Brihaspati takes his time with his generosity. Or another way would be, Brihaspati’s nakshatra is Pushya, which falls in the sign of Chandra, and Chandra gets to visit her more often than Brihaspati does, effectively making Chandra the lover while Brihaspati goes around the zodiac slowly doing his work.
So, would Brihaspati in Pushya have more significance somehow, it being the coming together of the higher octave of male-female energies?
I apologise if I am jumping ahead, or if you have already covered this.
To add to the above theory, Chandra and the sign of Cancer is emotions. So, with the absence of her husband, Tara is prone to emotions and depression perhaps? That ties in with the menstrual cycle every month when the Moon returns home to Cancer.
Hence, perhaps why, Chandra (emotions) cannot let Tara go, but Tara has the freedom to let go of Chandra. Perhaps, Brihaspati sending Indra to get Tara back was Him trying to use the senses to bring Her out of her stupor?
Mercury, being the child of the Moon, is communication based on emotions? Or perhaps it is Tara finding new ways of communicating with Brihaspati - the feminine energy finding new ways of communicating with the masculine energy?
I think you are coming up with some valid ideas Manisha. THere is a lot to these myths and jupiter also had another wife, subhatreyi. So one of his wives is Tara, the star, or you can say stars, but he lost that wife to the moon. Thats really quite interesting from an astronomical point of view because jupiter is more like a star in composition than a planet. Had jupiter some more mass, he would have been a star. Jupiter actaully emits some of his own light, he does not just reflect sunlight as do the other planets. So its quite interesting that one of his wifes is Tara, star, which is to say, star power as the wives are always the powers the deity has at his disposal, so Jupiter has star power. But the moon, comes and sleeps with that star power and does more with it than jupiter does, symbolized by the birth of a child, mercury. So in the end, the star power really is mostly under the sway of the moon and thus the moon has 27 consorts, or 27 powers. So whats happening is that the moon is differentiating star power as the nakshatras while jupiter is source of star power himself. Jupiter really is the star in our charts. The best thing we can do, how we can most shine, really is Jupiter. We wont shine like a full start, we are just human, but we can shine as our Jupiter star.
@ernst Thank you, Ernst. I have been trying to understand the planes, but I am not getting a clear visual image.
The Moon passes through the Nakshatras. That would mean that the Nakshatras would lie on the plane of the Moon. The Moon’s path intersects the Ecliptic. Hence all the Nakshatras do not lie on the Ecliptic. Am I reading that correctly?
The Moon receives the light of the Sun. So, he mixes the Sun’s light with that of the stars, thus giving birth to Mercury, the messenger of the Gods. It is the information that we receive as the Moon waxes and wanes.
I don’t remember all the mythological stories, but taking a guess, Subhatreyi translates to the bright or auspicious descendant of Atri, the sage who worshipped Agni. With her as the wife of Jupiter, it makes sense as to how following the fire of inspiration within us gets us Jupiter’s blessings.
I have been trying to find single words that would describe the planets in its entirety. Mercury is information and communication. But what is the root for it? As the moment, the closest I have gotten is “connection”.
Mercury asked, “Whose child am I?” Tara answered, “The Moon’s”. It is because of and through emotions (Moon) that we connect (Mercury) - with others, with the Divine, with the universe, or to the messages that come to us through the cosmos. It is because of being in alignment with the inspiration that ignites within us, that we push against the limitations put upon us, take steps into the unknown and thus grow.
I think there is something about the fact that the two visible planets on the extreme ends from Earth are androgynous, but I haven’t gotten there yet.
The nakshatras are thought to lie along the path of the ecliptic and not exactly on the moon's path. In reality, the stars named after the nakshatras often far so far north or south of the ecliptic that no planet, the sun or moon, will ever cross them. Thus the actual star with the nakshatra name probably has nothing to do with the stars at all and we are just dividing space by the moon's daily motion, thus 27 or 28 nakshatras. In fact, even having 12 rasis is lunar derived as there are 12 or 13 lunar months in a year and so we probably have 12 signs due to that. So then we can consider the idea of rasis created by the moon's cycle in relationship to the Sun, the montly cycle, and its relationship to the earth's motion, the daily cycle, to the Nakshatras.
So moon is really a fundamental part of both the rasi and nakshatra calendar.