Chandraचन्द्र

Chandra is the moon, and the second of the Navagraha. He is also Soma, which makes him one of the more layered figures in the tradition: Soma in the Rigveda is a plant, a pressed juice central to Vedic sacrifice, and the moon, and the three identities were never fully separated.

His practical importance is enormous and largely invisible. The Hindu calendar is lunisolar, and almost every festival, fast and observance is fixed by the moon's phase — Ekadashi, Purnima, Amavasya, Chaturthi, Ashtami, Navami. When a Hindu asks what date a festival falls on, the answer is a statement about Chandra.

In Jyotisha he governs the mind (manas), the emotions, the mother, and the tides of temperament, and is regarded there as second in importance only to the sun — in much of Indian astrological practice the moon sign carries more weight than the sun sign, which is the reverse of Western convention.

He is shown as a fair young man, luminous white, riding a chariot drawn by ten white horses or an antelope, holding a mace and a lotus.

The Rigveda's Soma is primarily the sacred plant and its pressed juice: the ninth mandala, over a hundred hymns, is devoted entirely to it. Soma is a deity, an intoxicant, and the substance that gives the gods their power — and the identification of Soma with the moon is present but secondary in the earliest layer.

The identification strengthens through the Brahmana period until, by the epics and Puranas, Soma and Chandra are simply the same deity. The reasoning offered is that the moon is a vessel of amrita, drained by the gods through the waning fortnight and refilled through the waxing — a picture that ties the lunar cycle to the sacrificial economy.

What the original Soma plant was remains genuinely unresolved. Ephedra is the most commonly proposed identification; others have been argued and none is settled. The plant fell out of use, the ritual substitutes were codified, and the deity became the moon.

As a graha, Chandra takes his place in the nine-planet scheme that consolidates in the early centuries CE, and the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra gives him his technical role.

He is also the ancestor of the Chandravamsha, the lunar dynasty, from which the Kauravas and Pandavas of the Mahabharata descend — the counterpart to the solar dynasty of Rama.

Chandra is shown as a young man of pale, luminous complexion, seated or standing in a chariot.

His chariot is drawn by ten white horses, or in other depictions by an antelope, and moves across the night sky. He holds a mace and a lotus, and wears white.

He is shown holding, or being, a kalash of amrita — the vessel of nectar which the gods drink down through the waning fortnight.

As a Navagraha he faces southeast in the nine-planet shrine and is placed immediately beside Surya, the two luminaries together at the centre of the arrangement.

The crescent is his most recognisable form, and it appears far more often on Shiva's head than in images of Chandra himself — Shiva is Chandrashekhara, moon-crested, and for most Hindus that is where the moon is seen in religious art.

His metal is silver, his gem the pearl, and his colour white throughout.

Soma — the Vedic identity, the plant and the pressed juice as much as the moon; still the name used in ritual contexts and in the mantra.

Chandra as a Navagraha — the second of the nine, governing the mind.

Somnath — "lord of the moon", the first of the twelve Jyotirlingas, where the tradition holds Chandra worshipped Shiva to be released from Daksha's curse. The temple's name is his.

Chandrashekhara — Shiva wearing the crescent; not Chandra himself but the form in which the moon is most often venerated.

Chandravamsha — the lunar dynasty descended from him through Budha and Pururavas.

Sudhakara — the maker of nectar, an epithet used in ritual poetry.

Daksha's curse and the phases. Chandra marries the twenty-seven daughters of Daksha — the nakshatras, the lunar mansions — and visibly favours Rohini, neglecting the rest. Daksha curses him to waste away. When he is nearly gone, the gods intercede; the curse cannot be revoked but is modified, so that he wanes and then waxes again. It is the tradition's account of the lunar cycle, and it is also, plainly, a story about the consequences of favouritism.

Somnath. Seeking relief from the curse, Chandra worships Shiva at Prabhas on the Gujarat coast and is released there. The temple built at the site is Somnath, first of the Jyotirlingas, and among the most repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt temples in India.

Tara and the war. Chandra abducts Tara, wife of Brihaspati, preceptor of the gods. The refusal to return her leads to the Tarakamaya war, gods against asuras, ended by Brahma's intervention. Tara returns pregnant, and the child is Budha — Mercury — whose parentage is disputed between the two. It is an unusually messy episode, and neither party emerges well.

Ganesha's curse. The moon laughs at Ganesha's belly and is cursed; looking at the moon on Ganesh Chaturthi is traditionally avoided for that reason, and anyone who does so is advised to hear the story of Syamantaka to undo it.

Swallowed by Rahu. At each lunar eclipse Rahu is said to seize him — the narrative treated more fully on Rahu's page.

Monday — Somvar — is his day, and it is shared with Shiva, whose crescent he is. The Monday fasts of Shravana are kept by very large numbers of people.

Purnima, the full moon, and Amavasya, the new moon, are the two poles of the Hindu month and are marked by fasting, bathing and ancestral rites. Sharad Purnima in Ashvina is kept as the night the moon is at its most complete, with rice pudding left out under it.

Karva Chauth turns entirely on him: the fast is broken only after the moon is sighted, viewed through a sieve.

His worship as a graha takes place in the Navagraha shrine, circumambulated in a prescribed order, with white offerings — rice, milk, white cloth, camphor and pearl. ॐ सों सोमाय नमः is the mantra.

The lunar calendar is his largest presence in practice. Tithis — lunar days — determine Ekadashi fasts, Pradosh, Sankashti Chaturthi, Purnima and Amavasya observances, and the dates of nearly every festival in the Hindu year. Two systems, amanta and purnimanta, divide the month differently in the south and north, which is why some festivals fall in differently-named months depending on where you are.

Somnath, Gujarat — the first Jyotirlinga, named for him, on the coast at Prabhas Patan; the current structure was completed in 1951 after a long history of destruction and rebuilding.

Thingalur Chandran Temple, Tamil Nadu — his shrine among the nine Navagraha temples around Kumbakonam.

Chandra shrines within Navagraha groups — present in most South Indian temples and many northern ones, where he stands beside Surya at the centre.

Prabhas Patan more broadly — a tirtha associated with him and with the end of the Yadava clan in the Mahabharata.

He has very few temples of his own, and his presence in Hindu religious life runs through the calendar and through Shiva's crest rather than through dedicated shrines.

Chandra's real importance is structural: he is the timekeeper. A tradition whose festivals are fixed to lunar phases has, in effect, built its entire ritual year on his cycle, and every Ekadashi fast and Purnima observance is an acknowledgement of that. Few deities are so constantly consulted and so rarely addressed.

The waxing and waning carry the tradition's most-used image of impermanence and return. He is cursed to diminish and permitted to recover, endlessly, and neither state is final. That the story explains this as the consequence of a fault — favouritism among wives — is characteristic: the cosmos behaves as it does because someone once behaved badly.

His governance of the mind in Jyotisha is worth noting for what it implies. The moon is the fastest-moving of the grahas, changing sign every two and a half days, and the tradition assigns it the part of a person that likewise shifts quickly and does not stay put. Whatever one makes of the astrology, the observation about temperament is a reasonable one.

And his relationship to Soma preserves something the tradition has otherwise lost. The plant is gone and no one is certain what it was; the ritual it powered has largely been replaced by substitutes. What survives is a name, transferred to the moon, still spoken every time the mantra is recited — a deity whose oldest identity is a substance nobody can now identify.