Meena

Meena is the twelfth and final rashi, the Vedic sign of the fishes, corresponding to Pisces. In jyotisha it is ruled by Jupiter (Guru), and it is the sign of Venus's exaltation, where Venus is held strongest. Its quality is dual or mutable (dvisvabhava), and its element is water (jala tattva). Jyotisha reads Meena through Jupiter's wisdom dissolved into feeling and the two fishes: compassion, imagination, surrender, and the merging of the self into something larger. As the last sign it carries themes of completion, liberation (moksha), and letting go. As a sidereal sign it is fixed to the stars and runs about 24 degrees behind tropical Pisces. Jupiter's rulership and Venus's exaltation here are dignities shared with Western astrology, and both traditions treat Meena as the most receptive and dissolving of the signs.

Meena, fish, translates the Greek ichthyes, fishes, plural in both languages for the sign's two linked figures; the transmission runs through the Yavanajataka, a versification of a Greek astrological text of roughly the second through fourth centuries CE, built on the twelve equal signs Babylonian celestial divination had already fixed by the fifth or fourth century BCE, with no twelve-sign zodiac of any kind attested in the older Vedic corpus. As the final rashi, Meena closes the cycle the Mesopotamian scheme opened at Mesha, and Jupiter's rulership together with Venus's exaltation here belong to the later classical layer, standardly credited to compilations such as the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra of roughly the seventh or eighth century CE, whose ascription to the sage Parashara is a pseudepigraphic attribution rather than a historical fact.

Sources Brihat Parashara Hora ShastraSage Parashara (attributed) with The Yavanajataka of SphujidhvajaDavid Pingree, Jyotihsastra: Astral and Mathematical LiteratureDavid Pingree

Guru, Jupiter, owns Meena, the second of his two signs, and the house it occupies is read through his condition.

Shukra, Venus, is exalted in Meena, with the exact point given as the twenty seventh degree, and Budha, Mercury, is debilitated here, with the low point at the fifteenth. This is the precise inverse of Kanya, where Mercury is exalted at fifteen degrees and Venus falls at twenty seven, and the two signs are opposite one another. The Kanya and Meena axis is therefore an exchange between Budha and Shukra, in the same manner as the Mesha and Tula exchange between Surya and Shani and the Karka and Makara exchange between Guru and Mangala. Venus's exaltation degree at twenty seven falls very near the end of the zodiac itself, which is one reason the final degrees of Meena receive close attention.

The nakshatras crossing Meena are the last quarter of Purva Bhadrapada, then Uttara Bhadrapada entire, then Revati entire. Their vimshottari lords are Guru, Shani and Budha. Revati closes both the sign and the circle of twenty seven mansions, and the junction at its end, where Meena gives way to Mesha, is the most heavily marked of the three gandanta points, since it is simultaneously the end of a water sign, the end of a fire sequence's approach, the end of the nakshatra cycle and the end of the zodiac. A planet in the last degrees of Revati is read with all of that in view.