The Saptarishi -- Who Are the Seven Sages?

On a clear night in the northern sky, seven bright stars form the shape the West calls the Big Dipper or the Plough. In India they have long been called the Saptarishi Mandala, the circle of the seven sages. Through the night and the year they wheel slowly around the pole star, as the sages themselves are said to keep their watch through every age of the world.

The Saptarishi are the great seers of the Vedic tradition: the rishis through whom the hymns were received and handed on. Tradition holds that in each manvantara -- each of the fourteen long ages ruled by a Manu -- a new group of seven holds this office, preserving the Veda and the order of the world. That is why the lists of names differ between texts: they are naming the seven of different ages.

The Bhagavata gives this list for the present age, the manvantara of Vaivasvata Manu, and the same seven names appear in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. An older and also widely quoted list names the seven mind-born sons of Brahma, the first sages of creation: Marichi, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu and Vasishtha. Both lists matter, for different reasons -- the first for the sages of our own age, the second for the sages at the very beginning of creation.

The seven sages are still present in ordinary Hindu life through the gotra, the lineage named when a family performs a ritual. Gotras trace descent from a rishi, and the great gotras are named after these sages and a few others, such as Bhrigu and Agastya. Traditionally a marriage within the same gotra was avoided, because the couple were held to share an ancestor.

The Gita gives the sages a place in creation itself. Krishna says that the seven great sages of old, and the four Manus, were born from his mind, and that from them all creatures in the world descend.

The sages are honoured together on Rishi Panchami, the fifth day of the bright fortnight of Bhadrapada, when many women keep a fast and worship the seven with Arundhati. Even without a festival, the night sky keeps them in view. Find the Plough, follow the two stars at the end of its bowl to the pole star, and you have traced the path the tradition imagined: seven teachers circling the one fixed point of the sky.