Kanya

Kanya, the maiden, is the sixth sign. Varahamihira's Brihat Jataka, as Iyer translates it, draws a young woman in a boat holding crops in one hand and a light in the other, and matches the sign to the navel of the Kalapurusha, the sign-built body of the book. The sign holds the last three quarters of Uttara Phalguni, all of Hasta and the first half of Chitra.

Mercury is both its lord and its exalted planet, with the peak at the fifteenth degree, and Venus is in its fall at the twenty-seventh. Virgo is also the mulatrikona of Mercury, a further place of strength, in the book's list, and it is a day sign that rises head first. Iyer's notes label it a dual sign, female and southern, of variegated color, and note that its first navamsa, a ninth part of the sign, belongs to Capricorn. The Greek-derived name offered for it is Pathona.

For a Moon in Virgo, the 1905 translation of chapter XVII lists lovely eyes, a slow gait through modesty, a soft body and voice, truthfulness, skill in dance and music and in painting and bookmaking, and a grounding in the Shastras. Other entries on the same list, which this page leaves aside, are less mild. The calculator reads Kanya as 150 to 180 degrees of sidereal longitude, so the sign ends at the point where the star Spica sits in the Lahiri scheme.