Mesha

Mesha is the Sanskrit name for the ram and the first of the twelve rashis, or signs. Varahamihira's Brihat Jataka, a book on horoscopes, starts its count of signs at the first point of Aries, which is also the first point of the lunar mansion Ashvini. The book sets the sign against the head of the Kalapurusha, an imagined cosmic figure whose limbs are the twelve signs, and Iyer's 1885 note gives its shape as a ram.

Mars is named as the lord of Mesha, and the Sun is exalted here at the tenth degree, its strongest placing. Saturn is put in its fall in this sign, at the twentieth degree. Iyer's notes class Mesha as movable, male, eastern and a night sign that rises feet first, and the book's list of colors makes it red. Aries is also the mulatrikona sign of Mars, a further kind of strong placement that the Brihat Jataka states by sign alone.

Chapter XVII of the book treats the Moon in each sign. In Iyer's 1905 translation the Aries entry lists round red eyes, a fondness for travel and a nature that relents quickly, and the closing stanza adds that such results come fully only when the Moon, its sign and that sign's lord are all strong. On the calculator, Mesha covers 0 to 30 degrees of sidereal longitude, a stretch that begins roughly 24 degrees after the Western sign of the same name begins.