Why is the Nashik Kumbh called the Simhastha?

The sky is divided into twelve parts, and each part is a राशि rashi, a sign. Leo is one of the twelve, and the planets move through them in turn. Jupiter is बृहस्पति Brihaspati, and in the stories he is the guru of the gods, which is why people call the planet Guru as well. The Kumbh at Nashik and Trimbakeshwar comes when Brihaspati is in Simha, and so it is the Simhastha Kumbh.

Ujjain’s Kumbh is a Simhastha too, and comes when Jupiter is in Leo and the sun and the moon are in Aries, and the four Kumbh places has the rest of that.

Because Jupiter is the slow one. The sun goes round the twelve signs in a year and the moon in a month, but Jupiter takes about twelve years to go round them all, spending about a year in each. So it comes back to Leo once in about twelve years, and that is why the Kumbh comes to Nashik once in about twelve years, and the twelve-year cycle has the whole of that.

The sun and the moon come into it after that. The full rule for Nashik’s Kumbh is Jupiter in Leo with the sun and the moon in Cancer.

The Godavari rises on Brahmagiri, the hill above Trimbakeshwar. People say she disappears into the hill and comes out again at Kushavarta, and the source of the Godavari tells the whole of that story. The river has another name, the Gautami, after the rishi Gautama who brought her down onto that hill. A तीर्थ tirtha is a place of pilgrimage, and in the oldest sense a crossing place on a river. The Gautami Mahatmya is the old text about the river, and here is what it says about bathing in it when Jupiter is in Leo, the way it tells it.

When Gautama had brought the Ganga down out of Shiva’s matted hair onto the top of Brahmagiri and she had set off east towards the sea, he walked round her once and turned to Shiva, who had appeared beside him, and asked him how a man should bathe in her.

Shiva told him. First the rites, and feed the brahmins, and ask their permission. Go to the river without talking to anyone whose ways are bad. Keep your hands and your feet and your mind under control. Rub the legs of the tired people you meet, feed them, give clothes and blankets to the poor, and listen to the stories of Vishnu and of the Ganga on the way. A man who goes on pilgrimage like that gets what the tirtha has to give.

Then Shiva said this. A bath in the Ganga of the north counts at Gangadwar, where she comes down out of the hills, and at Prayag, and where she meets the sea. A bath in the Narmada counts at Amarkantak. But a bath in the Gautami counts everywhere, always, at my word. Other tirthas are at their best on certain days. The Gautami is a tirtha for everyone on every day. And bathing in the Ganga for sixty thousand years is on a par with one bath in the Gautami when Brihaspati is in Leo. It is rare that men are able to bathe in the Gautami when Jupiter is in Leo. And she is holy because Ram stepped into her.

Shiva gave her six names — Gautami, Vaishnavi, Brahmi, Godavari, Nanda and Sunanda. He said that of the five elements, water is the best. Of waters, the tirthas. Of the tirthas, the Bhagirathi, the Ganga. And of all the streams of the Bhagirathi, the Gautami that Gautama brought down, with the matted hair in it, is the best of all, and there is no tirtha to match it in heaven, on earth or below.

This is what Nashik tells.

Jupiter was in Leo on the day the Godavari came down onto Brahmagiri, and for as long as it stays there, about a year at a time, the other rivers and the seas and the tirthas come with the rishis and live on her bank. The whole of what Nashik tells about her, and the king in whose days she came, is on What the old texts say.

The day Jupiter enters Leo is not guessed. The Government of India publishes a panchang every year, the Rashtriya Panchang, and it prints the day and the hour that Jupiter moves out of Cancer and into Leo. For this Kumbh, the day the panchang gives is the same day the authority has fixed for the flag hoisting at Ramkund and at Kushavarta that opens the Kumbh period. The dates themselves, with what the authority has said about them, are on the main Kumbh page.

One thing to know when you look it up. The panchang counts the signs the Indian way, from the fixed stars, which is not the way a western horoscope counts them, so the day it gives for Jupiter entering Leo is the one the Kumbh follows.

The bathing is in the Godavari, at the two kunds. A कुण्ड kund is a tank or pool with stone sides and steps, fed by the river or a spring. At Nashik it is Ramkund, the pool on the bend of the river at Panchavati. At Trimbakeshwar it is Kushavarta, the kund in the middle of the town. The sadhus who come are in their akhadas. An अखाड़ा akhada is an order of sadhus with its own head, its own rule, its own property and its own place in the bathing order at a Kumbh. The Vaishnav akhadas bathe at Ramkund and the Shaiva and Udasin akhadas at Kushavarta, and why the Kumbh is at two places has that arrangement. The naga sadhus says who you will see at Kushavarta.

Beside Ramkund is the Ganga Godavari temple, and its door is the surest sign you are in a Simhastha year. It stays shut for eleven years. On Kartik Purnima, once in twelve years, it is opened, and it stays open for a year, through the Simhastha, and then it is closed again. The temples of Nashik has it, and the Godavari at Nashik is the river all of this is on.