Vishakha is the sixteenth nakshatra, straddling the Libra-Scorpio boundary from 200 to 213 degrees 20 minutes of the sidereal zodiac. Its Vimshottari ruler is Jupiter; its presiding deities are the paired Indra and Agni (Indragni), gods of the thunderbolt and the sacred fire; and its symbol is a triumphal archway or a potter's wheel. The name means forked or two-branched. Jyotisha reads Vishakha through focused, goal-driven purpose that concentrates toward a single aim, the archway one passes through in triumph, and classes it as Rakshasa gana. The double deity gives it a theme of combined power directed to victory, with a note of the delayed reward that comes just after the branching point. These are interpretive conventions laid over the Libra-Scorpio border stars Indian astronomy assigns here.
Vishakha's padas run through Leo, Virgo, Libra and Scorpio. Indragni, the paired invocation of Indra and Agni together, appears as a single compound deity in Vedic ritual formulas distinct from either god invoked alone, and its use here as Vishakha's presiding pair is one of relatively few nakshatras assigned a compound rather than a single deity, a structural oddity some commentators connect to the mansion's own forked, two-branched name and its position straddling the Libra-Scorpio boundary. The potter's wheel given as an alternate symbol in some classical lists, rather than the triumphal archway, points to a variant tradition of nakshatra symbolism that differs across regional and sectarian compilations of the doctrine, a divergence recorded rather than resolved in the secondary literature.