Magha Nakshatra: the ancestors' star that opens Leo, Gandanta, the Ketu dasha and the texts

Magha is the tenth nakshatra and begins the second cycle of nine: Leo 0 degrees to Leo 13 degrees 20 minutes. Its start is a Gandanta seam, where Cancer and Ashlesha end and Leo and Magha begin together. Its Vimshottari lord is Ketu, as for Ashwini, and its classical deity is the ancestors. If your Moon was in Magha at birth, it sets the Ketu Mahadasha your life began in, gives you the Rat yoni, Rakshasa gana and Antya nadi in matching, and places your Moon under a sub-lord. The nakshatra calculator shows yours.

This page sets out what the corpus books say about Magha, with chapter, sloka or page, beside what the engine computes: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (BPHS), Kalyana Varma's Saravali, Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara and Advanced Predictive Astrology, all on the sources page. For Moon sign and nakshatra in general see Moon sign and nakshatra; for the sign, Leo, Simha Rashi.

Where Magha sits, and the Sun's Mooltrikona

Nine nakshatras of 13 degrees 20 minutes make exactly four signs, so the second cycle restarts at Leo 0 degrees with Magha, and Magha runs to Leo 13 degrees 20 minutes (Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara, Ch. II, pp. 22-23, for the arithmetic). All four padas are in Leo, the Sun's sign. BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 51-54 says that in Simh "the first 20 degrees are Sūrya's Mooltrikon, while the rest is his own Bhava", so by the text the whole of Magha is the Sun's Mooltrikona.

Leo is a fixed sign, so the engine counts its navamsas from the 9th sign, Aries; Magha's padas are Leo's first four navamsas, Aries to Cancer. BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 87-88 agrees: nine nakshatras have passed, 9 divided by 3 leaves 0, plus the pada gives the 1st to 4th signs from Mesh. None is Leo, so no graha in Magha is Vargottama. See the Navamsa (D9) calculator.

The ancestors, the plough and the banyan

BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 24-26 names the tenth nakshatra deity Pitar, the ancestors. Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara (Ch. IV, p. 98) names the Pithru devas, the manes, and describes Makha as five stars in the form of a plough. The Saptavimshamsa (D27) calculator uses the BPHS list.

The entry gives Magha's sex as female, its tatthwa as Jala (water), its region as the South-east, its body parts as the lips and chin, and its emblem as the banyan tree; the direction table (p. 90) and body-part table (p. 91) agree. It names a caste, which is not carried over. Among its associations it lists devotion to filial duty and religious rites, possession of horses and elephants, valour and wealth, and a non-vegetarian diet; it also has a clause about women, which, like the engine, this page drops.

How Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara classifies Magha

The book ties its nature labels to timing (p. 91): during the period of a planet situated in a particular star, effects will be felt according to its characteristics, so in its terms the dasha of any graha placed in Magha takes a ferocious quality. It says the body-part table, here the lips and chin, helps locate disease with the 6th lord; that is its claim, not medical advice. The app uses neither. The yoga list (pp. 28-29) says the third yoga, Aayushman, begins at Makha, which places the yoga on the zodiac rather than describing people.

What the texts say about a person born in Magha

Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara's two descriptions of Magha differ in tone. The prose (p. 98) is favourable: numerous servants, great wealth, a comfortable life, worship of the gods and the ancestors, and engagement in important works. The translated sloka (p. 99) is mixed: hard-hearted but taking good care of the parents, with intense feelings and a love of learning, and a closing clause about being capable of much harm. As for every entry, the effects come fully only if the Moon is powerful (p. 91).

The engine's NAKSHATRA_TRAITS line follows the sloka and drops its last clause: you tend to be "intense and hard-headed, but deeply devoted to family and a genuine love of learning". Its comment gives the standing rule for all 27 entries: caste dropped, appearance and spouse lines dropped, harsh verdicts softened to a tendency.

Saravali mentions Makha only in a technical aside: in its chapter on lost horoscopy (Ch. 52, on recovering a birth star from a query), it says that when the arithmetic is rectified by subtracting 9, the count runs from Makha. That is a counting convention, not a statement about Magha births. Advanced Predictive Astrology repeats, citing a magazine, a generalisation that Rahu dasa tends to be difficult for people born with Asvini, Makha or Moola as the birth star (Vol. II, p. 125); all three are Ketu's stars at Gandanta seams. It is not in BPHS and the app does not apply it. A Magha Moon is a Leo Moon, so Saravali's sign chapter (Ch. 23) applies; it is covered on the Leo page.

Gandanta: the seam between Ashlesha and Magha

BPHS Ch. 92 Sl. 3 makes "the last two Ghatikas of Aslesha and first two Ghatikas of Magha" one of the three Nakshatra Gandantas. A Ghatika is 24 minutes, and the Moon spends about a day in a nakshatra, so two Ghatikas is roughly the first half-degree of Magha. Sl. 4 adds a Lagna Gandanta at the same line: the last half Ghatika of Kark and the first half Ghatika of Simh, about twelve minutes of time either side. Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara (p. 87) calls Makha a Gandantha nakshatra because it begins a rasi. On the other side of the seam is Ashlesha.

BPHS lists Gandanta births among inauspicious ones (Ch. 85 Sl. 1-4), mentions them in a longevity clause (Ch. 9 Sl. 13), and in Ch. 94 Sl. 8-9 names the Aslesha-Magha seam, with Jyeshtha-Mula, as calling for the largest remedial gifts. Those passages are named so you know they exist; this page makes no such prediction and the app prescribes no remedies. The engine does not compute Gandanta.

The Moon's Navamsa in each Magha pada: Saravali Ch. 24

Saravali Ch. 24 reads the Moon by its Navamsa and the aspecting graha. A Magha Moon is in Mars's Navamsa in pada 1 (Aries, Sl. 1-3), Venus's in pada 2 (Taurus, Sl. 4-6), Mercury's in pada 3 (Gemini, Sl. 7-9) and its own in pada 4 (Cancer, Sl. 10-12). Among the milder lines: Mars's Navamsa aspected by Venus, a minister's position and wealth; Venus's aspected by Mercury, music and dance; Mercury's aspected by Jupiter, a minister and a repository of good qualities; the Moon's own Navamsa aspected by Jupiter, a minister or a king. Other lines are harsh and not repeated.

Ketu, the lord of Magha, and the Ketu Mahadasha

BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 12-15 assigns the Vimshottari lords in a cycle of nine from Krittika, and the eighth lord, Ketu, takes Ashwini, Magha and Mula, each the first nakshatra of a sign group and each at a Gandanta seam. Ketu's period is 7 years; the engine's nakshatraSubdivision() agrees. Magha's sub-lord arcs are therefore laid out exactly as Ashwini's, shifted to Leo. For Ketu as a graha, see Ketu in Vedic astrology.

The balance rule is BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 16. Your dates are in the Vimshottari Dasha calculator; the period is described on the Ketu Mahadasha page. BPHS Ch. 48 Sl. 1-8 makes a dasha's content depend on the lord's placement and associations, which for Ketu, owning no sign in the seven-graha scheme, carry the weight. BPHS Ch. 47 Sl. 34-39 does give Ketu dignities: exaltation in Vrischik, Mooltrikona in Dhanu, own sign Vrischik (or Meen, in another view). Leo is none of these, and the engine gives Ketu no dignity at all.

The sub-periods inside the Ketu Mahadasha

In the worked example 0.375 of 7 years, 2.625 years, had passed at birth: through the Ketu, Venus, Sun and Moon sub-periods (2.51 years together) and into Mars's. The engine's sub-lord table puts Leo 5 degrees in the Mars sub (Leo 4 degrees 47 minutes to 5 degrees 33 minutes), the same answer by construction. With a Ketu period this short, a Magha native is usually into the 20-year Venus Mahadasha in early childhood.

Magha as a dignity for every graha

The label for the Sun has a number attached. dignityOf() returns a position-strength (sthana) value used in the Shad Bala calculation: 10 for exaltation or Mooltrikona, 7.5 for own sign. So a Sun in Magha enters the Shad Bala calculator's position component at 10, as BPHS's Mooltrikona would give it, and a Sun in Leo 20 to 30 degrees, in the later part of Purva Phalguni or in Uttara Phalguni, gets the own-sign 7.5. Before the October 2026 correction the two were swapped, so a Shad Bala figure saved earlier for a Leo Sun can differ by 2.5 on this component.

Running the engine's dignityOf() anywhere in Magha, with natural relationships only, gives: Sun, Moolatrikona (as BPHS has it, above); Moon, friendly sign; Mars, friendly sign; Mercury, friendly sign; Jupiter, friendly sign; Venus, enemy sign; Saturn, enemy sign. Ketu and Rahu are outside the engine's dignity table.

On Saravali's ray scale (Ch. 36 Sl. 3-6, the formula the engine's planetaryRays() uses), worked by hand, the rays do not track the sign label. The Sun, though in its own sign, has only about 2.72 rays at the start of Magha and 2.20 at the end, because rays measure distance from deep debilitation (Libra 10 degrees), and Leo is closer to Libra than Aries is. Mercury, nearing its exaltation in Virgo, has about 5.25 to 5.77; Jupiter, past its peak, about 6.03 to 5.51; Saturn about 3.89 to 4.41.

The Sun crosses Magha once a year: the engine's sidereal Sun for 2026 enters it on 17 August and leaves for Purva Phalguni on 31 August. With Magha rising the Ascendant is Leo, and BPHS Ch. 34 Sl. 29-30 names Mars, Jupiter and the Sun as auspicious for it, Mercury, Venus and Saturn as malefics, a Jupiter-Venus conjunction as not productive of good results, and Saturn and the Moon as killers; the engine's YOGA_KARAKA_BY_LAGNA row for Leo matches. A birth time near the Lagna Gandanta at Leo 0 degrees is where the Lagna calculator's need for an accurate time and place matters most.

The nine sub-lords inside Magha

The engine divides Magha in proportion to the Vimshottari years, beginning with Ketu's own arc. The sub-lord calculator reports these for every graha.

The Gandanta stretch at the start of Leo lies inside the narrow Ketu sub. For why sub-lords need an accurate birth time, see the sub-lord and birth time.

Magha in the Kala Chakra and the other dasha systems

BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 56-58 places Magha in the Apsavya Kala Chakra, and Sl. 72 names it with Rohini, Vishakha and Shravana as nakshatras whose Deha and Jiva are "the same, as for Rohini"; Sl. 73-76 then give Rohini's four rows, which Magha shares. Magha's Navamsas, Aries to Cancer, are the same as Rohini's, so the same check applies. Adding the Sl. 84 years along the rows gives 81, 74, 85 and 100; Sl. 89's figures for those Navamsas, read in reverse pada order as the Apsavya rows of Mrigashira's group require, are 86, 83, 85 and 100. Padas 3 and 4 fit as printed; padas 1 and 2 do not, because pada 1's row ends in Tula and pada 2's ends "Vrischik and Vrischik". The text itself forces the repair: Sl. 73-76 name Kark and Tula as those padas' Deha, the Deha is the last sign of an Apsavya row (Sl. 94-95), and only Kark and Tula give Sl. 89's 86 and 83. The table shows the rows as the app reads them, and the app computes the Kala Chakra Dasha, with its balance and dates, from the Moon's longitude.

Read by hand, Ashtottari (Sl. 17-20) gives Magha to the Moon, first of its three stars (Magha and the two Phalgunis), a 15-year dasha in that system; with three stars each carries a third, 5 years, which matches Sl. 21-22's share for a benefic. For a Moon 5 degrees into Magha, 0.375 x 5 = about 1.9 years have expired, leaving about 13.1 years of the Moon's Ashtottari dasha at birth. Shastihayani (Sl. 40-41) lists Magha under Mars, 10 years. The engine now builds both: Ashtottari in full, with Abhijit read from the Moon's longitude as Sl. 21-22 direct and every period dated, and Shastihayani with a balance at birth and dated periods by the rule "as in Vimshottari", which BPHS does not state and the app takes from a published reference outside it (Sanjay Rath). Shat-trimshat-sama (Sl. 42-43), counted from Shravana, gives Magha to Rahu, 8 years, and is built too.

These and the six other systems the engine builds appear in the alternate dashas calculator. For a Magha Moon: Shodshottari (from Pushya) Jupiter, 13 years; Dwadashottari (birth star to Revati) Jupiter, 9; Panchottari (from Anuradha) Jupiter, 18; Shatabdik (from Revati) Mercury, 10; Chaturashiti-sama (from Swati) Moon, 12; Dwisaptati-sama (from Mula) Mars, 9. Three of the six begin with Jupiter. BPHS ties each system to a particular kind of chart, and the calculator shows which apply.

These systems are where Magha stops looking like Ashwini. In Vimshottari the two are indistinguishable: same lord, same sub-lord arcs, same Navamsa signs for each pada, and the same balance for the same distance into the star. The other systems count with eight or seven lords instead of nine, so the same position in a nine-star cycle lands on different lords: Ashwini begins Shodshottari with Ketu and Panchottari with Venus, Magha begins both with Jupiter. The engine's alternate-dasha table is the one place in the app where an Ashwini Moon and a Magha Moon at the same degree of their signs produce different timing.

Magha in Ashtakoot matching

Running the engine's ashtakoot() with a Magha Moon gives the values below. The Kundli matching calculator applies them to two charts.

The engine's comment calls these conventional tables, kept because no corpus book prints the Ashtakoot rules; its Tara rule never scores 0, since the two inclusive counts between different stars total 29 and cannot both leave 3, 5 or 7 after dividing by 9. Advanced Predictive Astrology's Kapha column (Vol. II, p. 225) is exactly the engine's Antya group, a modern grouping used for health tendencies and reported as such. Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara's vainasika rule (Ch. IV, p. 89), the 22nd star from one's birth star to be avoided for auspicious events, gives Rohini for Magha; the app uses neither.

Magha in muhurat

In the engine's muhurat finder, Magha is on one list only: Marriage. A marriage window with the Moon in Magha gains 16 points on the nakshatra factor; for the other five activities it loses 6. Tithi, paksha, the Moon's house from your chart, the weekday, Rahu Kaal and your numerology day are added on top.

This is a place where the engine's list and the classical labels pull apart. Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara classes Magha as ferocious and downward-looking, and BPHS Ch. 92 Sl. 1 says marriage and other auspicious functions during Gandanta are to be avoided, which covers the first moments of Magha. The engine's Marriage list cites no source and does not test for Gandanta. That disagreement is reported here rather than resolved.

Seen as a whole, the Marriage list does not follow the book's natures either way. Its eleven stars are Rohini, Mrigashira, Magha, Uttara Phalguni, Hasta, Swati, Anuradha, Mula, Uttara Ashadha, Uttara Bhadrapada and Revati: four of the book's fixed stars (all of them), three soft, two movable or light, one hot (Mula) and one ferocious (Magha). Magha is the only ferocious star on any of the engine's six lists.

From the engine's Moon positions, sampled every ten minutes, the next passes through Magha are 3 November 2026 03:50 to 4 November 03:30 IST, 30 November 09:50 to 1 December 09:10 IST, and 27 December 18:10 to 28 December 16:40 IST, each close to 24 hours. The muhurat finder samples three windows a day, at 06:40, 09:15 and 15:30 IST. The Panchang shows the current nakshatra.

Checking Magha in your own chart

The Moon's nakshatra needs the date and a time, not the place. The app's Moon longitude is good to about 0.1-0.3 degrees, as the methodology page explains, comparable to the width of the Gandanta stretch, so for a Moon in the first few tenths of a degree of Leo the app cannot honestly say whether it is in Magha or still in Ashlesha; that changes the Moon sign (Leo or Cancer) and the first Mahadasha (Ketu or Mercury). The ayanamsa moves every boundary together; see why apps disagree on your nakshatra. The Moon sign calculator shows sign and nakshatra together.

Magha between Ashlesha and Purva Phalguni

Before Magha, across the Gandanta seam, is Ashlesha, Mercury's star; after it is Purva Phalguni, Venus's star, which shares Magha's Rat yoni and its ferocious and downward-looking labels. Magha opens the Makha-Pubba-Uttara triad as its Sristi member. In the Vimshottari pattern Magha repeats Ashwini's position in the cycle, and Mula repeats it again. The symmetry runs through all three Gandanta seams: each is crossed from a Mercury star (Revati, Ashlesha, Jyeshtha) into a Ketu star (Ashwini, Magha, Mula), and each is also a water-to-fire sign boundary.

Which planet rules Magha nakshatra?

Ketu, with a 7-year Mahadasha, in the Vimshottari scheme of BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 12-15. The sign lord is the Sun, because all of Magha is in Leo.

Who is the deity of Magha?

The ancestors: BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 24-26 names Pitar, and Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara (Ch. IV, p. 98) names the Pithru devas, the manes.

What is the symbol of Magha?

Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara describes five stars in the form of a plough, represented by the banyan tree. The engine's Yoni animal for Magha is the Rat, shared with Purva Phalguni.

Is the Sun in Mooltrikona in Magha?

By BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 51-54, yes: the first 20 degrees of Leo are the Sun's Mooltrikona, and Magha is Leo 0 to 13 degrees 20 minutes. This app's engine uses the same range and labels a Sun in Magha "Moolatrikona" (until October 2026 it had the range as Leo 20-30 and said "Own sign").

Is Magha a Gandanta nakshatra?

Its start is. BPHS Ch. 92 Sl. 3 makes the last two Ghatikas of Aslesha and the first two of Magha a Nakshatra Gandanta, and Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara calls Makha a Gandantha star. The app does not compute Gandanta.

What is the gana, yoni and nadi of Magha?

Rakshasa gana, Rat yoni and Antya nadi in this app's matching engine, which uses the conventional tables.

Is Magha good for marriage?

This app's muhurat engine lists Magha for marriage only, worth 16 points on the nakshatra factor. Jyotisha Siddhanta Sara classes Magha as ferocious, and BPHS advises against marriage during Gandanta; the engine's list cites no source.

Which Kala Chakra group is Magha in?

The Apsavya group reckoned like Rohini (BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 72), with Vishakha and Shravana. The app computes the Kala Chakra Dasha on the alternate dashas calculator and the Kundali screen.

Which Navamsa is a Magha Moon in?

Aries in pada 1, Taurus in pada 2, Gemini in pada 3 and Cancer in pada 4, by the engine's rule and BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 87-88 alike. Pada 4 is the Moon's own Navamsa, which Saravali Ch. 24 Sl. 22-24 rates at medium strength.

When is the Sun in Magha?

Once a year for about two weeks: the engine's sidereal Sun for 2026 enters Magha on 17 August and Purva Phalguni on 31 August.

How long is the Ketu dasha at birth for a Magha Moon?

Up to 7 years: 7 times the share of Magha still ahead of the Moon. 5 degrees in leaves 4.375 years.