Shatabhisha nakshatra: Rahu's star in Aquarius, what the texts say and how to check yours

Shatabhisha is the twenty-fourth nakshatra, Aquarius 6°40' to 20°00', and Rahu rules it in the Vimshottari scheme. It is the second of Rahu's three stars, after Ardra and Swati, and it sits in Aquarius exactly as Swati sits in Libra, from 6°40' to 20°00' of the sign, so the two stars share a lord, an arc within their signs and a sub-lord table. This page sets out what the classical books in this app's library say about Shatabhisha, with chapter and page, and every number on it comes from running the engine.

It is part of a 27-page series laid out the same way, so it can be read beside Dhanishta before it, Purva Bhadrapada after it, and Swati, its twin in Libra. The sign is described on the Aquarius (Kumbha) page. The engine's method is on the methodology page and the books on the sources page.

Where Shatabhisha sits: the arc, the padas and the engine's facts

Shatabhisha is the 24th of the 27 nakshatras. Each nakshatra is 13°20' of the sidereal zodiac, 360 degrees divided by 27, and this app measures them from 0° Aries in the Lahiri (Chitrapaksha) frame. So Shatabhisha runs from Aquarius 6°40' to Aquarius 20°00', wholly inside Aquarius. A planet is "in Shatabhisha" when its sidereal longitude falls inside that arc. When someone says "my nakshatra is Shatabhisha", they mean the Moon was there at birth: the Janma Nakshatra. The Moon moves about 13 degrees a day, so it crosses a nakshatra boundary inside most birth dates, and the nakshatra calculator reports the star at both ends of the birth date when no time is given. The difference between a rashi and a nakshatra is set out separately, as is why two apps can name two different stars for the same birth.

Shatabhisha lies wholly inside Aquarius, touching neither edge, so a Moon there is always an Aquarius Moon, with Saturn as sign lord and Rahu as star lord. No deep exaltation or fall degree in BPHS Ch. 3 Sl. 49-50 falls inside it, and it is not at a Gandanta junction. The engine places the three Rahu stars nine apart, Ardra, Swati and Shatabhisha, and because nine stars are exactly four signs, Libra and Aquarius being in trine, Swati and Shatabhisha occupy the same degrees within them.

Inside the star the engine draws nine unequal sub-divisions, one for each Vimshottari lord, each as wide as that lord's share of the 120-year cycle, and the first belongs to Shatabhisha's own lord, Rahu. These sub-lords matter most for points that move fast through the sky, above all the Ascendant, which is why the sub-lord needs a birth time to the minute. The sub-lord calculator prints this same table for your own Moon:

What the classical texts say about Shatabhisha

Three books in this app's library speak about Shatabhisha directly. Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara (Rama R. Rao, 1994) gives every nakshatra a description in Ch. IV; the corpus copy is a scan with no text layer, so the pages cited below were read as images. Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (BPHS) uses Shatabhisha as a counting point and a member of groups rather than describing it. Advanced Predictive Astrology names it among the "windy" stars, and BPHS names it once more in a chapter on women's charts that the app does not use. The readings are reported as the texts give them, with the same omissions the engine makes: the caste label each nakshatra carries in Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara is not repeated, nor are its predictions about appearance and marriage.

Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara, Ch. IV (pp. 87-110)

Entry 24 calls the star "Sathabhishak or Sathabhisha", "in the form of a circle, comprising a hundred stars", with Varuna as presiding deity. It places it in the "northern region", gives the right thigh as its body part, and lists those associated with it as "physician, poets, minister, tradesman, washerman, dealer in liquors and wine", associated with "fish, hogs and birds".

The prose reading is mixed: the person "will be harsh in his speech, will be truthful, will suffer grief, will conquer his enemies, will thoughtlessly engage in work and will be of independent ways". The sloka and its translation: "always excessively adventurous, he is blunt in his speech and clever. He is extremely cruel to his enemies." The engine softens the last clause, as its comment says it does for harsh verdicts, into "adventurous and direct in speech, clever, and formidable when challenged". Both readings agree on bluntness of speech and on overcoming enemies.

Shathabhisha is one of the chapter's three neuter stars, with Mrigashira and Moola (p. 87), and one of the five movable stars, with Sravana, Dhanishta, Hasta and Swaathi (p. 90). Page 91 makes the class a timing rule for any planet placed in the star during its period. It is the Laya member of the Sravana triad (p. 88), so the chapter's durithamsa caution covers its third and fourth padas, Aquarius 13°20' to 20°00'.

The direction is the one place the chapter contradicts itself about this star. The list of directions on p. 90 puts "Uttaraashaada, Sravana, Dhanishta, Shathabhisha, Poorvaabhaadra" in the north-western regions, while entry 24 on p. 109 says "northern region". Entry 25 for Poorvaabhaadra repeats the same mismatch. The book does not comment on it.

BPHS: Shatabhisha as a deity, a count and a group

BPHS lists Satabhisha twenty-fourth, and Ch. 6 Sl. 24-26 names the twenty-fourth deity Varuna, the same name it gave the twentieth, Purva Ashadha. Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara does exactly the same, so both books give Varuna two stars four places apart.

Ch. 46 places Shatabhisha in two groups. Shastihayani (Sl. 40-41), for charts with the Sun in the Lagna, gives "Shatabhisha, P.Bhadra, U.Bhadra" to Rahu, 6 years, so a Shatabhisha Moon has Rahu as first lord in both Shastihayani and Vimshottari. Kalachakra puts "Shravan, Dhanishtha and Shatabhisha in the Apsavya" (Sl. 56-58), and Sl. 77 names Shatabhisha among the eight Apsavya stars whose padas follow Mrigashira; the pada table uses Sl. 78-81. No dasha system in the chapter counts from Shatabhisha.

BPHS names the star once more, in Ch. 80 on female horoscopy (Sl. 43), as part of a combination of weekday, star and tithi to which it attaches dire predictions. The app does not use the combination and this page does not repeat it; it is cited so a reader who meets it elsewhere knows its source.

For Rahu as a graha, see the Rahu page; for the Moon, the Moon in Vedic astrology page.

Advanced Predictive Astrology

Advanced Predictive Astrology (Vol. II) puts Satabhisha in its Vata group of humour-producing asterisms (p. 225), and in the same health chapter lists it among the stars that "rule over wind", saying that when the Lagna or the Moon's sign "falls in any of the above stars and the above stars are afflicted, they give rise to windy diseases". The book applies this in a case study where Mars is "posited in a windy constellation in Aquarius". These are the author's readings in a chapter on health and are not medical advice.

Where the sources disagree

The deity agrees across both books, Varuna, though both also give Varuna to Purva Ashadha. Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara disagrees with itself on direction, north-west on p. 90 and northern on p. 109.

The engine's Rakshasa gana and Horse yoni for Shatabhisha have no source in this library, as its header says; the Aadi nadi has the partial anchor in the humour table, where Shatabhisha is Vata. The engine leaves Shatabhisha off all six muhurat lists, including Travel, even though Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara classes it movable with Shravana and Dhanishta, both of which the engine does put on its Travel list. The book does not tie the movable class to travel, so this is recorded as a difference, not an error.

Shatabhisha and Swati side by side

Because the two Rahu stars sit at the same degrees of two signs in trine, it is easy to assume they are read alike. Laying the sources and the engine's tables side by side shows how much they share and where they part.

The classical sources agree on the structure, a movable Laya star with the durithamsa caution on its last two padas, and differ on everything descriptive. The app's tables differ on gana, nadi, yoni and muhurat, none of which a book in this library sources. Reading Shatabhisha as "Swati in Aquarius" would therefore borrow the wrong deity, the wrong element and the wrong matching profile; the only things the two genuinely share are the lord, the arc within the sign, the navamsa sequence and the sub-lord table.

The four padas of Shatabhisha

Each nakshatra splits into four padas of 3°20', and each pada is one navamsa, so the 108 padas of the zodiac walk through the twelve signs nine times. BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 87-88 gives the rule as arithmetic: take the number of nakshatras already passed, divide by 3, multiply the remainder by 4, add the pada, and count that many signs from Aries. For Shatabhisha's first pada: 23 nakshatras have passed, 23 divided by 3 leaves 2, times 4 is 8, plus 1 is 9, and the 9th sign from Aries is Sagittarius. The engine's computeNavamsa, which uses the sign-based rule from Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara Ch. II, returns Sagittarius too. The Navamsa calculator shows the whole D9 chart, and the Navamsa article explains why it needs an accurate birth time.

Shatabhisha is the last star of its group of three, so its navamsas are Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. The third pada, Aquarius 13°20' to 16°40', is vargottama: Aquarius in both the birth chart and the navamsa. Running the engine over all 108 padas finds Shatabhisha the only Aquarius star with a vargottama pada, which is simply where Aquarius's own navamsa falls for a fixed sign, the fifth of its nine.

That vargottama pada is also inside Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara's durithamsa range, the third and fourth padas of a Laya star. The two labels come from different rules and do not cancel or reinforce each other in any text here; the app computes vargottama and does not compute durithamsa.

The Kalachakra columns are the Mrigashira pattern of BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 78-81: Cancer and Pisces as Deha and Jiva in the first pada, Taurus and Gemini in the second, Capricorn and Gemini in the third, Aries and Sagittarius in the fourth. The app computes Kalachakra from these rows.

Shatabhisha and the dasha sequence

BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 12-14 finds the first Vimshottari dasha by counting from Krittika to the birth star and dividing by nine; the remainder picks a lord from the sequence Sun, Moon, Mars, Rahu, Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Ketu, Venus. Counting Krittika as 1, Shatabhisha is 22; 22 divided by 9 leaves 4, and that is Rahu. The engine reaches the same lord from its own table. Sl. 15 gives Rahu 18 years. A Moon in Shatabhisha therefore starts life in a Rahu Mahadasha, and Sl. 16 says how much of it remains: the part of the nakshatra the Moon has still to cross, as a share of the whole, times 18 years.

Run on a sample birth of 1 January 2000 with the Moon a quarter of the way into Shatabhisha, the engine leaves three quarters of the Rahu period, 13.5 years, and dates the next periods from there:

What a Rahu period is classically held to bring is on the Rahu Mahadasha page and the Rahu in Vedic astrology page; the Vimshottari dasha calculator gives your own dates, and the sub-periods article explains why those dates move when the birth time moves. A Shatabhisha Moon starts in Rahu's 18-year period and moves next into Jupiter's 16 and Saturn's 19, the same sequence as a Swati Moon, since both are Rahu stars.

Ashtottari is the 108-year system BPHS Ch. 46 Sl. 17-20 offers as an alternative "when Rahu is not in Lagn, in any other Kendr, or Trikon to the Lord of the Lagn". It assigns stars in alternating runs of four and three from Ardra. Shatabhisha is the second of Jupiter's run of three, Dhanishta, Shatabhisha and Purva Bhadrapada, so a Shatabhisha Moon starts in a Jupiter period of 19 years. Sl. 21-22 gives a benefic's period a third per star, so at the very start of Shatabhisha a third of Jupiter's period is taken as already over. Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara Ch. V (p. 120) prints the same grouping as a table. The app computes Ashtottari this way, with the balance and every period dated, on the Alternate Dashas calculator and the Kundali screen.

The engine does compute six other nakshatra-based systems from the same chapter, each with its own starting star and condition. For a Moon in Shatabhisha (sampled at the middle of the star) the alternate dashas calculator returns:

Of the engine's six systems, Chaturashiti-sama gives Shatabhisha Mars for 12 years and Dwisaptati-sama Venus for 9. Since Swati and Shatabhisha share a Vimshottari lord, it is worth noticing that they do not share lords in the other systems: Chaturashiti-sama, counted from Swati, gives Swati the Sun and Shatabhisha Mars.

Shatabhisha in compatibility and muhurat

Ashtakoot matching, the 36-point Guna Milan the match tool runs, reads four of its eight kootas from the two Moon nakshatras: Tara, Yoni, Gana and Nadi. The engine places Shatabhisha in the Rakshasa gana, the Aadi nadi and the Horse yoni. Its own header is candid that none of the classical books it works from contains the Ashtakoot rules, no nakshatra gana list and no koota point scale, so these tables are carried as they are rather than cited. One partial anchor exists: Advanced Predictive Astrology (p. 225) prints "Humour Producing Asterisms" in three groups of nine, Vata, Pitta and Kapha, and that grouping coincides star for star with the engine's Aadi, Madhya and Antya nadis. Shatabhisha sits in its Vata group. The book does not call this Nadi koota, and this page does not claim it does.

Two people with the Moon in Shatabhisha score 28 of 36 in the engine: full marks on seven kootas and 0 of 8 on Nadi, because the same star always means the same nadi. The other stars sharing Shatabhisha's Aadi nadi, and so also scoring 0 on Nadi against it, are Ashwini, Ardra, Punarvasu, Uttara Phalguni, Hasta, Jyeshtha, Mula, Purva Bhadrapada. On Yoni, Ashwini shares the Horse and scores the full 4; the engine treats the Buffalo as the Horse's enemy, so Hasta and Swati score 0; every other pairing scores 2.

Tara counts from each partner's star to the other's. The engine marks a count as unfavourable when it leaves 3, 5 or 7 after division by 9, and BPHS Ch. 44 Sl. 15-21 does name the 3rd, 5th and 7th stars from the birth star Vipat, Pratyak and Vadh, though in a chapter on longevity this page does not reproduce. Counted forward from Shatabhisha, the unfavourable stars are Ashwini (5), Krittika (7), Pushya (12), Magha (14), Uttara Phalguni (16), Anuradha (21), Mula (23), Uttara Ashadha (25), Uttara Bhadrapada (3). The score is 3 when both directions are clear, 1.5 when one is, and 0 when neither is. The compatibility feature shows every koota with its points, so a low total can be traced to the factor behind it.

For choosing a time, the muhurat feature and the muhurat calculator add 16 points to a window when the transiting Moon is in a star on the activity's list and take 6 away when it is not. Shatabhisha is on none of the six lists, so a window with the Moon there always takes the 6-point deduction. Shatabhisha is on none of the six lists, while its fellow movable stars Shravana and Dhanishta are on four each. Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara (p. 89) also calls the 22nd star from one's birth star the vainasika nakshatra, "to be avoided for auspicious events"; for a Shatabhisha native that is Jyeshtha. The engine does not apply that rule.

Checking Shatabhisha in your own chart

1. 1.Open the nakshatra calculator with your birth date and, if you have it, time and place. It returns the Moon's star, its pada and its lord. Without a time it also shows the star at 00:00 and 23:59, so you can see whether Shatabhisha held all day.
2. 2.Check the pada against the table above. The pada fixes the Moon's navamsa, which the Navamsa calculator shows in full.
3. 3.If your Moon is within a few arc-minutes of a sub-lord boundary, the sub-lord calculator prints the distance to the next one. An error of a few minutes in the birth time can move it.
4. 4.Open the Vimshottari dasha calculator to see the Rahu balance at birth and every period after it.
5. 5.Look at the whole chart in the birth chart calculator. A star describes the Moon's placement; the houses, the Ascendant and the other planets are read from the full chart.
6. 6.For matching, enter both birth details in the match tool; it computes both stars itself, so nothing has to be typed in by name.

For a Shatabhisha Moon check the pada first: the third is vargottama and the third and fourth carry the durithamsa label. The Navamsa calculator confirms the D9 sign, and the kundali feature shows the full chart.

Common misreadings of Shatabhisha

• "Shatabhisha is a healing star." Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara does list physicians first among its people, alongside poets, ministers, tradesmen, washermen and liquor dealers. That is a list of significations, not a career forecast, and the book attaches no special healing meaning to it.
• A Rahu star is not a malefic star. Rahu as star lord fixes the dasha order; the temperament readings in the books are mixed, not dark.
• Shatabhisha being off every muhurat list in the app is a choice in the engine's table, not a classical prohibition found in these books.
• The "windy" grouping in Advanced Predictive Astrology concerns afflicted stars in a health chapter. It is not a statement that a Shatabhisha native will have any particular illness, and it is not medical advice.
• Vargottama and durithamsa both apply to the third pada, but from different books and rules. Neither makes that pada better or worse on its own.

Questions about Shatabhisha

Which sign is Shatabhisha nakshatra in?

Aquarius, entirely: Aquarius 6°40' to 20°00'.

Who is the lord of Shatabhisha?

Rahu, with a Vimshottari period of 18 years. The deity, in both BPHS and Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara, is Varuna. See the Rahu Mahadasha page for what the period is held to bring.

Which pada of Shatabhisha is vargottama?

The third, Aquarius 13°20' to 16°40'. The others have Sagittarius, Capricorn and Pisces navamsas.

How is Shatabhisha related to Swati?

Both are Rahu stars, and both occupy 6°40' to 20°00' of their signs, Libra and Aquarius. Their sub-lord tables are therefore the same, degree for degree within the sign; their deities, signs and engine tables differ.

What gana, nadi and yoni does the app give Shatabhisha?

Rakshasa gana, Aadi nadi and the Horse yoni, shared with Ashwini. The engine's header says these tables have no source in this library.

Is Shatabhisha good for travel in the app?

It is not on the Travel list, so a travel window with the Moon there takes the 6-point deduction on the nakshatra factor. The muhurat feature shows all the other factors.

Why does the book call it a "hundred stars"?

That is Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara's description of its form: "a circle, comprising a hundred stars". The book does not explain the number further.

When does Sade Sati fall for a Shatabhisha Moon?

The engine defines Sade Sati as transiting Saturn in the 12th, 1st or 2nd sign from the natal Moon. A Shatabhisha Moon is always in Aquarius, so the band is Saturn in Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. The Sade Sati calculator gives the dates; the transit is separate from the Rahu dasha.

Which star is the vainasika star for a Shatabhisha native?

Jyotisha-Siddhanta-Sara (p. 89) calls the 22nd star from the birth star the vainasika nakshatra, "to be avoided for auspicious events". Counted from Shatabhisha it is Jyeshtha. The app's muhurat engine does not use the rule.

What does a Shatabhisha pair score in the match tool?

28 of 36: full on seven kootas and 0 on Nadi. The match tool prints every koota with its points.