Vrishabha

Vrishabha is the second rashi, the Vedic sign of the bull, corresponding to Taurus. In jyotisha it is ruled by Venus (Shukra), and it is the sign of the Moon's exaltation, the place where the Moon is held strongest. Its quality is fixed (sthira), and its element is earth (prithvi tattva). Jyotisha reads Vrishabha through Venus's steadiness and the bull's patience: endurance, sensual enjoyment, material stability, and a slow, unshakeable persistence. Because the Vedic zodiac is sidereal, Vrishabha is anchored to the fixed stars and runs about 24 degrees behind the tropical Taurus. The rulership by Venus and the Moon's exaltation here are dignities shared with Western astrology, drawn from the same older layer of the tradition; jyotisha builds its own extensive readings of house, aspect, and dasha on top of them.

Vrishabha's name is a direct translation of the Greek tauros, bull, carried into Sanskrit through the Yavanajataka, a versification of a Greek astrological text datable to roughly the second through fourth centuries CE; the twelve equal thirty-degree signs this name belongs to were themselves defined centuries earlier still, in Babylonian celestial divination of roughly the fifth or fourth century BCE, and have no origin in the older Vedic corpus, where no twelve-sign zodiac of any kind appears. The specific dignities jyotisha attaches to Vrishabha, Venus's rulership and the Moon's exaltation among them, belong to a later classical layer of the tradition, generally credited to compilations such as the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra of roughly the seventh or eighth century CE, a text whose ascription to the sage Parashara is itself a later, pseudepigraphic attribution.

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

Shukra, Venus, owns Vrishabha, and the house that Vrishabha occupies in a given chart is read through Shukra's condition wherever he happens to sit. This is the ordinary logic of rashi lordship in jyotisha and it applies before any characterisation of the sign is brought in.

Chandra, the Moon, is exalted in Vrishabha, and the texts give the exact degree as the third. This is the highest point of the Moon in the whole zodiac, and it is one of the more heavily used facts in the system, because the Moon carries far more weight in jyotisha than in Western practice: the birth Moon determines the janma nakshatra, sets the starting point of the vimshottari dasha sequence, and is often used as an alternative ascendant for reading the chart a second time. A Moon near three degrees of Vrishabha therefore affects the reading in several places at once. No planet is assigned debilitation in Vrishabha, which makes it one of the signs with an exaltation and no matching fall.

The nakshatras crossing the sign are Krittika in its last three quarters, Rohini entire, and Mrigashira in its first two. Rohini is the mansion in which the Moon is exalted, and the two facts reinforce one another: the exaltation degree of the Moon falls inside Rohini, so the sign, the mansion and the planet all point the same way at that part of the zodiac. That convergence is unusual, and it is why this arc receives so much attention in practice.