Rahu

Names

• Rahu — the ascending lunar node. Born of Simhika, in the Navagraha hymn.¹

The thief at the churning

The Mahabharata’s Astika Parva tells Rahu’s origin within the churning of the ocean. As the gods drank the amrita, the nectar of immortality, a Danava named Rahu drank among them disguised as a god. Surya and Soma, the Sun and Moon, recognised him and told the gods.²

Narayana at once cut off the Danava’s well-adorned head with his discus, but Rahu had already tasted the amrita. The headless trunk fell and rolled on the ground, shaking the earth.²

The epic draws the astronomical conclusion itself. A long-standing quarrel began between Rahu’s head and the Sun and Moon, and to this day the head swallows them during solar and lunar eclipses. The myth is an explanation of eclipses in narrative form.²

Rahu’s chariot and course

The Vishnu Purana gives Rahu a dusky chariot drawn by eight black horses that, once harnessed, stay yoked forever. It also describes his movement. At the parvas, the lunar and solar nodes when eclipses occur, Rahu moves from the Sun to the Moon and back again from the Moon to the Sun.³

This Puranic picture is more abstract than the epic one. Rahu is no longer only a head chasing two enemies but a moving point that meets the luminaries at regular intervals. That idea is close to the astronomical understanding of eclipses as occurring at the nodes of the Moon’s orbit.³⁴

A node in Jyotisha

The notes to Santhanam’s translation of the Brihat Parasara Hora Sastra explain Rahu and Ketu as shadowy nodes of the Moon, always 180 degrees apart. Chapter 3 describes Rahu as smoky in appearance with a bluish body, fearsome, forest-dwelling, windy in temperament and intelligent. It classes both Rahu and Ketu as malefics.⁴

Head with hands, head alone

Sculptors gave Rahu a recognisable face early on. On LACMA’s lintel from Uttar Pradesh (c. 600–625) Rahu has an oversized ear, bulging eyes and thick eyebrows. His expression is sneering rather than snarling, and the museum finds him more humorous than frightening. His left hand makes a grasping gesture and holds a water vessel.⁵

The Cleveland Museum of Art’s relief of the 700s shows Rahu as a bodiless head representing the eclipse. The museum explains that he swallows the Moon, which then falls out of his severed neck, the reason an eclipse ends. LACMA’s hands and Cleveland’s bodiless head are two sculptural solutions to the same narrative of a head without a body.⁶