When Rohini Stayed: A Tale of the Moon and the Twenty-Seven

This is the story of the Moon and his twenty-seven wives, and of the one wife he could not stop favouring. In Hindu tradition the Moon is a god — called Chandra or Soma — and the twenty-seven wives are the nakshatras, the “lunar mansions” or star-groups that the Moon passes through on its monthly journey across the sky. The tale explains, in the language of family and feeling, why the Moon waxes and wanes, why Shiva wears a crescent in his hair, and why one nakshatra, Rohini, holds a special place in Indian astrology.

It is a short story, but it has a long reach: it touches the calendar, the star lore of Jyotisha (Indian astrology), a famous Shiva temple on the Gujarat coast, and the way Hindus still talk about the Moon today.

The people in the story

• Chandra (Soma) — the Moon, imagined as a radiant young god who rides across the night sky.
• Daksha Prajapati — a son of Brahma and one of the Prajapatis, the “lords of creatures” charged with populating the world. Prajapati is his office, not his personal name. He is known in many stories as proud, exacting and quick to take offence.
• The twenty-seven daughters — Daksha’s daughters who are also the twenty-seven nakshatras, from Ashvini at the beginning of the circuit to Revati at its end.
• Rohini — the fourth of the twenty-seven, the Moon’s favourite.
• Shiva — the great god who, in this story, rescues the Moon and gives him a permanent home.

The story

A marriage with a rule

Daksha gave twenty-seven of his daughters in marriage to the Moon. Each daughter was a nakshatra, each a face of the sky. There was one condition, spoken or understood: the Moon was to share his time equally, spending a night with each wife in turn.

For a while he kept to it. But Rohini, fourth among the sisters, was the most beautiful to him — bright, warm, the colour of the early monsoon sky. He began to forget the others. He stayed with Rohini through her own night, and then through nights that belonged to her sisters. The other wives waited, and their lamps burned low.

The complaint to Daksha

The neglected sisters went home to their father. Daksha, who measured time like a careful priest, first asked the Moon to treat his wives fairly. In many tellings he warns him more than once. When the Moon still did not change, Daksha cursed him. In the version told here he simply touched the Moon’s brow and said: You will wane. Other tellings describe the curse as a wasting sickness.

From that night the Moon began to dwindle. Each evening he grew thinner, until he was a sliver no larger than a fingernail paring and it seemed he would vanish from the sky altogether.

The crescent we see today is a remembered apology.

Shiva’s shelter

Terrified of disappearing, the Moon went to Shiva on the banks of the Saraswati and asked for help. Shiva could not simply undo a curse that had already been spoken, but he could soften it. He placed the dying Moon in his matted hair and let him wax again.

From that came the bargain we still see: the Moon waxes for fifteen nights and wanes for fifteen, emptying almost to nothing and filling again — visiting all twenty-seven wives, returning to each in turn. Daksha’s word stands, and so does Shiva’s mercy. Neither cancels the other; they take turns.

Because Shiva carries the crescent on his head, one of his best-known names is Chandrashekhara, “the one crowned with the Moon”.

Where the story comes from

There is no single “original” version. The tale appears in several places, and they do not all agree on the details.

• The Vedic layer. The Taittirīya Saṃhitā, a text of the Black Yajurveda, tells of Prajapati giving his daughters to King Soma, who favours Rohini over the rest; the neglected wives return to their father and Soma falls ill until he agrees to treat them equally. In that version the number of daughters is thirty-three rather than twenty-seven, and the father is Prajapati himself rather than Daksha.
• The Mahābhārata. The epic connects the Moon’s recovery to a sacred bathing place on the Saraswati river, where it meets the sea at Prabhasa. This is the setting the telling above keeps: the Moon seeking help on the banks of the Saraswati.
• The Purāṇas. The Śiva Purāṇa and other Purāṇas tell the story as the origin of the Somnath temple at Prabhasa on the coast of Gujarat. There the Moon worships Shiva, and Shiva, pleased, eases the curse so that the Moon wanes in one half of the month and waxes in the other. The name Somanātha means “Lord of Soma”, that is, “Lord of the Moon”. Somnath is counted first among the twelve jyotirlingas, Shiva’s especially sacred “lingas of light”.

Some tellings put the curse in Daksha’s mouth, some do not. The crescent in Shiva’s hair is attached to several different accounts of how it got there. And the Moon’s waning is explained elsewhere by episodes that have nothing to do with Rohini at all — for example, the story in which the young Ganesha curses the Moon for laughing at him. This page tells one version and does not claim it is the only one.

Twenty-seven wives, twenty-seven nights

The number twenty-seven is the whole of it. The Moon completes a circuit of the fixed stars in a little over twenty-seven days — 27.32, to be exact about a thing the tradition was exact about long before it was written down. (This is the sidereal month: the time the Moon takes to return to the same place among the stars. It is shorter than the roughly twenty-nine and a half days from one full Moon to the next.)

Divide the band of sky the Moon crosses into twenty-seven equal parts and he spends close to one night in each. Those parts are the nakshatras. Each covers 13° 20′ of the zodiac, and each is named after a star or small group of stars that marks it. The story calls them daughters of Daksha and wives of the Moon because that is what the arithmetic looks like when you tell it as a family.

So the myth is not decorating an idea. It is carrying a measurement. Much of it corresponds to something an observer can check:

• twenty-seven wives, because there are twenty-seven divisions;
• one night each, because the Moon’s passage through a division takes about a night and a day;
• a husband who cannot stay, because the Moon never once stops moving;
• even the complaint has a mechanical form — a Moon that lingered in one mansion would break the calendar.

If you want the twenty-seven as the tradition actually describes them, each with its own deity, symbol and shakti (characteristic power), how to read a nakshatra sets out what the nine published fields mean, and Rohini is where this story’s favourite is set out in full.

Why Rohini, and not one of the others

Two answers, and they sit oddly well together.

The name and the star

The first is in the name. Rohini carries the sense of the reddish, the rising, the ruddy — hence the colour of the early monsoon sky in the telling above. She is the visible one. The star the nakshatra is named for is the brightest in that stretch of the zodiac: the reddish star known in the West as Aldebaran, the “eye” of the constellation Taurus. A Moon passing close by such a star is easy to notice, and it is easy to imagine him lingering.

The father and the favourite

The second is stranger, and it is the kind of internal echo that suggests the story was assembled by people who knew the system well. Rohini’s presiding deity is Prajapati — the one who brings forth. And Daksha, the father of the twenty-seven, is himself a Prajapati; that is his office, not his name. The favourite daughter’s god and the aggrieved father’s title are the same word. The story never draws attention to this, which is usually a sign that it was not invented for effect. It also sits comfortably beside the older Vedic version, in which the father is simply called Prajapati.

The astrological seat

Jyotisha closes the circle. Two technical terms matter here:

• Exaltation (uccha) — the sign in which a planet is considered at its strongest and most dignified.
• Moolatrikona — a planet’s “root” or working seat, a stretch of the zodiac where it is said to function most naturally, second only to exaltation.

The Moon is exalted in Vrishabha (Taurus), and Rohini lies entirely inside that sign. The Moon’s moolatrikona, its working seat, runs from the fourth degree of Vrishabha to the end, which covers Rohini completely. So Rohini is both where the Moon is celebrated and where the Moon does its work — the only nakshatra lying wholly within both. A story about a husband who would not leave one particular house was told about the one house the system itself treats as his best.

What the tale carries

Ask a Vedic astrologer about the Moon and they will almost certainly mention Rohini, because the Moon is exalted in the sign that contains her. Writers in the tradition often describe it poetically as the place where the Moon does not have to perform, where it remembers the texture of being loved.

In Jyotisha the Moon stands for the mind and the emotions, so the story is often read as a reflection on the mind itself: it has places where it rests easily, and it is tempted to stay there and neglect everything else. In that reading every chart, every kundali (birth chart), has its own “Rohini” — a place where the mind rests easiest. That is a way of reflecting, not a prediction; the Moon’s nakshatra is one factor among many, and nothing about it fixes a person’s life.

If you know your own Moon’s nakshatra, you may know a little of where you wish to stay. The instruction the story leaves us is not to abandon the rest of life. It is gentler than that: it is permission to know which night is your easiest, and to make room for it — while still keeping faith with the other twenty-six.

Fairness, and a curse that is softened

The tale is also often read as a story about fairness. The Moon’s fault is not that he loves Rohini, but that his love for one becomes neglect of the others, who had an equal claim on him. Daksha’s curse is harsh, but it answers a real wrong. Shiva’s response is typical of him in the Purāṇas: he does not argue with the curse, he gives shelter to the one who suffers under it, and turns an ending into a cycle.

What the story explains, and what it does not

Worth separating, because the two are often run together.

The phases of the Moon are a matter of geometry: how much of the lit half faces us as the Moon moves around the Earth relative to the Sun. The story does not compete with that and was never intended to. What it does is give a shape to a periodicity that mattered enormously to people organising a year by the sky — the twenty-seven-fold division, and a Moon that returns to each division in turn and cannot be held anywhere.

That periodicity is still built into the Hindu calendar. The traditional almanac, the panchang, records each day’s nakshatra alongside its tithi, the lunar day measured by the changing angle between Sun and Moon. The waxing half of the month (shukla paksha) and the waning half (krishna paksha) are the fifteen-and-fifteen of the story, written into the year.

Read on AdiVeda

• Rohini Nakshatra — the favourite daughter’s deity, symbol and qualities in full.
• How to Read a Nakshatra — what the terms in a nakshatra profile mean.
• Exalted and Debilitated — how Jyotisha rates a planet’s strength, including exaltation and moolatrikona.
• The Night the Moon Was Humbled — another story of the Moon under a curse.
• Dwadasha Jyotirlinga Stotram — the hymn to Shiva’s twelve jyotirlingas, beginning with Somnath.