Cast & Chart

Nakshatra

Krittika

कृत्तिका · Cutters

Vimshottari lord: Surya. A dasha is one planetary period in that scheme, a pada is a quarter of a nakshatra, and a navamsa is a ninth of a sign.

This page reports what named books say and what a calculator computes. It is not a statement about you or about anything to come, and it cannot decide health, money, law, marriage or children.

About this entry

Krittika begins at 26 degrees 40 minutes of Aries and ends at 10 degrees of Taurus, so it is the first nakshatra to cross a sign boundary. Iyer's note on the Brihat Jataka puts the start of Taurus at the second of its four quarters. Its marker star in his table is Alcyone, in the Pleiades. The Vimshottari lord is the Sun, with a period of 6 years, and the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, in its typed Sanskrit text on Wikisource, edition unidentified, counts the timetable from Krittika.

The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article by A. M. Clerke says the oldest layer of the nakshatra list opened with Krittika and that Ashvini took first place later. The nakshatra chapter of the Brihat Jataka credits a person born under the Moon here with a bright appearance and wide-spread fame. Other items in the same entry are unflattering and this page leaves them aside.

Where this text comes from

Statements credited to an older text follow the scanned or typed text named here. Statements about the calculator describe its own rules, and modern practice is labeled as modern.

Our own plain wording. Quoted lines keep the spelling of the scanned source.