Revati

The name means the wealthy, or the nourisher. If your Moon was here when you were born, you have probably been called an old soul more than once, usually by someone you had just helped without being asked.

The deity and the symbol

Revati's deity is Pushan, the herdsman god, protector of travellers and of flocks, the one who sees you safely to the far side of the road. Its symbol is a fish, or a drum.

I think of Pushan walking at the back of the herd, where the slow ones are, so nobody gets left. That is Revati. The last nakshatra has walked past all the others and it knows who is likely to fall behind.

The core signature

Your Moon has a quality of completion. In a way that is hard to put into words, you carry something of all the nakshatras before you, distilled. You present as someone who has already been through a good deal of what the people around you are still meeting for the first time, and it is not an act.

You are gentle, you feel for people, and you look out for the ones with less experience than you. You smooth the way for travellers, the literal ones and the ones passing through grief or illness or a hard change. You do it so naturally that you may not have noticed it is the thread running through your whole life.

Something more than the material surface is close to you. You may or may not use religious words for it. Either way, there is a quality in how you live that says you have not forgotten there is more going on than meets the eye.

The emotional life

Your feelings take the shape of whatever holds them. Water in a bowl, water in a river. You adapt to the emotional situation you find yourself in, which is a large part of how you serve.

You absorb other people. The far end of Pisces is the most permeable place in the zodiac, and what others feel comes straight through the wall and into you. Protecting yourself from that is the maintenance the instrument requires, and if you skip it you will pay for it.

You carry a sense of nearing the end even in the middle of life. There is a gentleness about you that comes from having nothing left to prove, and it makes you seem older than your years and draws younger people to you for the kind of advice they will not take from their parents.

Strengths

Your first gift is safe passage. People moving through hard country, loss, sickness, a life coming apart or coming to an end, find in you someone who can walk beside them without being swept away, because you know the road.

Your second gift is breadth. Because Revati holds something of everything that came before it, you can meet many kinds of people exactly where they stand, and speak to each of them in their own language.

Your third gift is unhurried care. In rooms that are frantic and demanding, you bring a quality of attention that reminds everyone present of something they had forgotten was possible. You slow the room down and nobody minds.

Challenges

The first challenge is dissolving. You can lose yourself in other people, in spiritual states, in the very openness that is your gift. Without something to stand on, Revati drifts, and drifting can look like serenity for a long time before it looks like loss.

A second is rescuing that has become enabling. The instinct to protect can shield people from consequences they needed to meet. Pushan guards the traveller. He does not carry them, and he does not walk the road for them.

A third is a melancholy of endings. The sense that everything is passing, that loss is everywhere, that your job is to grieve what is going. Some of that is true and some of it is weather. Every ending you are mourning is sitting beside a beginning you have not looked at yet. Look at it.

In love and work

In love you give generously and you give without keeping score, and a partner who takes advantage of that will drain you dry before you notice. Choose someone who notices when your cup is empty and fills it without being asked. You would do it for them. Expect the same.

In work you need something to shepherd. Animals, children, the sick, the dying, the lost, the people in transition. Nursing, palliative work, teaching the young, animal care, counselling, anything with Pushan in it. You also need gentleness in your surroundings. Harsh environments damage you more than they damage more armoured people, and quality of place and relationship matter to you the way food matters. And keep a practice. The closing of the zodiac is a natural place for spiritual work, and without a practice your Revati nature drifts. With one, it comes into its full authority.

Mercury's influence

Mercury in Jyotish is Budha, the messenger, the graha of mind, speech and connection, a benefic when well placed. His rulership gives Revati its ability to translate. You can speak to the frightened in words they can hear, and that is Mercury's work as much as Pushan's.

Mercury also gives you adaptability and quickness of mind under the gentle surface, and a love of the small practical kindness, the right word at the right moment. His shadow is scattering, and in the most permeable nakshatra of all, scattering is the thing to watch. Keep one clear channel open and let the rest of the noise go by.

Across the traditions

Revati lies entirely in sidereal Pisces, the last of the twelve, so the Vedic chart reads this Moon through Pisces's compassion and its dissolving of boundaries. In your Western chart the same Moon sits about 24 degrees further along, which places it in Aries, somewhere between the second week of the sign and about its twenty fourth degree. The Moon in the Signs page covers that Western reading, and the pairing surprises people. A Western Aries Moon tells you about courage and the quick response. The nakshatra tells you that the courage is being spent walking at the back of the herd, with the ones who are struggling, where nobody is watching.

Who is falling behind in your life right now, and are you walking with them or carrying them?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.

Related pages
Pisces in Vedic Astrology