Hora D2 Chart

What this section adds

The calculator above tells you which half of its sign each of ten points occupies, and the notes beside it explain the code in two paragraphs. This section goes further: where the rule is written down, what else in classical astrology carries the name Hora and is not this, how to check the result by hand, what the texts say a Sun or Moon Hora is for, where the same ten answers are reused elsewhere in this app, and how much a wrong birth time can change them. Every number comes from the engine, run on the same sample birth the page uses.

Where the Hora rule is written

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra lists sixteen divisions of a sign in Ch. 6 Sl. 2-4, beginning with the Rasi itself and then Hora, Dreshkan, Chaturthamsa and so on up to Shashtiamsa. Hora is the second on the list and the coarsest cut of all: one sign, two parts. The rule follows in Sl. 5-6. The first half of an odd sign is the Hora ruled by the Sun and the second half is the Hora of the Moon; in an even sign the order is reversed. The same slokas add the count: half a sign is a Hora, and there are 24 of them in the zodiac. The other fourteen cuts each have their own page here, from Drekkana (D3) to Shashtiamsa (D60).

Kalyana Varma's Saravali gives the identical rule in Ch. 3 Sl. 14: the first Hora of an odd sign belongs to the Sun and the second to the Moon, and in an even sign the first is the Moon's and the second the Sun's. Sl. 17 of the same chapter does the bookkeeping: 24 Horas and 36 decanates make 60 parts in the whole zodiac. The two texts agree completely on the rule, which is unusual enough among the vargas to be worth saying. There is no alternative Hora scheme in either of them.

Saravali Ch. 3 Sl. 18 also gives one arithmetic recipe for every varga: convert the position inside the sign to minutes of arc, multiply by the varga number, and divide by 1,800, the number of minutes in a sign. For Hora the varga number is 2, so the recipe reduces to asking whether the position is below or above 900 minutes, which is 15 degrees. That is exactly the test the engine applies.

The word itself is older than the division. BPHS Ch. 4 Sl. 1-2 derives Hora from Ahoratr, day-and-night, by dropping the first and last syllables. Saravali Ch. 2 Sl. 1-5 repeats the derivation and then notes that usage had already split: some call the Lagna Hora, some call half a sign Hora, and the whole science of the horoscope is called Horasastra. A day-and-night pair, cut in two, with the Sun owning one part and the Moon the other, is the picture behind the varga.

Four things called Hora, and which one this is

Because the word is used so widely, a reader who searches for Hora will meet at least four different objects. The page's own FAQ separates two of them; the classical texts need all four kept apart.

The planetary hour is the one most often confused with D2. It belongs to a day, not to a birth chart: the Hora Timings calculator takes a date and a place, cuts sunrise-to-sunset and sunset-to-sunrise into twelve parts each, and names a ruling graha for every part. Seven grahas rule those hours; only two rule the halves of a sign. Hora Lagn is a third object again. BPHS Ch. 39 Sl. 12 and Sl. 15 use it alongside the natal Lagn and the Ghatik Lagn in Raj Yoga rules. When those slokas say Hora, they mean that moving ascendant, not the half-sign on this page.

The rule as a table you can check by hand

You need two facts about a point: its sign and its degree inside that sign, both of which the birth chart calculator prints. Odd signs are the first, third, fifth and so on counted from Aries; even signs are the second, fourth, sixth and so on. Below 15 degrees is the first half. The engine's test is strictly less than 15, so 15.00 exactly belongs to the second half.

Read the table down its columns and a pattern appears that neither text states but both imply. The second half of Aries and the first half of Taurus are both the Moon's. The second half of Taurus and the first half of Gemini are both the Sun's. Halves that share a lord always meet across a sign boundary, so the zodiac is really twelve unbroken 30-degree blocks, each running from the middle of one sign to the middle of the next. The Sun's blocks are centred on the first degree of the odd signs; the Moon's on the first degree of the even signs. This matters for birth-time sensitivity, as the sweep further down shows.

A second consequence follows from the same arithmetic. Any two points exactly opposite each other sit at the same degree of signs six apart. Six apart keeps both signs odd or both even, so the two points always share a Hora. The page's FAQ explains this for Rahu and Ketu; it is equally true of the Ascendant and the point opposite it, the cusp of the seventh house. A chart's rising and setting points can never be split between the Sun and the Moon.

The sample chart, degree by degree

The worked example on the page is a birth on 14 August 1994 at 06:42 in Ahmedabad. The page shows the ten lords. Here are the positions the engine computed underneath them, so each answer can be checked against the table above.

Three rows deserve a closer look. The Sun is at 27.26 degrees of Cancer. Cancer is an even sign, so its second half is the Sun's Hora, and the Sun therefore sits in its own Hora while occupying the Moon's sign. Using the Saravali recipe: 27.26 degrees is about 1,636 minutes, doubled is 3,272, divided by 1,800 gives 1 with a remainder, so the point has passed one full Hora and is in the second. The Moon at 24.64 Libra is the mirror case: Libra is odd, the second half is the Moon's, and the Moon is in its own Hora.

The third is the pair that sits close to the line. Jupiter at 13.55 Libra is 1.45 degrees short of the midpoint and Venus at 12.92 Virgo is 2.08 degrees short. Both are safe at this birth, but they are the two rows a different ayanamsa could flip, because an ayanamsa shifts every sidereal position by the same amount. Mars at 4.42 Gemini and the nodes at 25.40 are nowhere near a boundary and would give the same Hora under any of the common settings.

Notice also that Jupiter and the Moon share a sign, Libra, and still land in different Horas. The Rasi chart shows them together in the third house from a Leo Ascendant; the Hora separates them. This is the only new information a D2 result adds to a birth chart: a second, finer statement about where inside its sign each point stands.

What the texts say a Hora is for

Wealth, in one line

BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 1-8 assigns one subject to each of the sixteen divisions: the physique from the Lagn, wealth from Hora, co-born from Dreshkan, the spouse from Navamsa, and so on. That single phrase is the whole of the classical basis for calling D2 the wealth varga. The chapter does not go on to say that the Sun's Hora means more money than the Moon's, and neither does this site. In the Rasi chart, wealth is the business of the second house, which the article on the 2nd house, Dhana Bhava covers; Hora is the divisional view BPHS attaches to the same topic.

Which graha is effective in which Hora

The one detailed rule comes a few slokas later. BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 13-16 says Jupiter, the Sun and Mars give pronounced effects in the Hora of the Sun; the Moon, Venus and Saturn do so in the Hora of the Moon; and Mercury is effective in both. It adds that the Moon's Hora is powerful in an even sign and the Sun's Hora in an odd sign, and that the effects are full, medium and nil at the beginning, middle and end of a Hora respectively. The same grading, it says, applies to Dreshkan, Navamsa and the rest.

In the sample, all seven classical grahas happen to stand in the Hora the text names for them. That is a property of this birth, not a typical result: with seven grahas and two halves, most charts show a mixture. The text gives no rule here for Rahu and Ketu, so nothing is said about them. The calculator returns a lord for the nodes because the geometry defines one, but there is no sloka in this corpus to read it by.

The beginning-middle-end clause can be checked the same way. The Sun at 27.26 Cancer is 12.26 degrees into a 15-degree Hora, which is its last part. Mars at 4.42 Gemini is in the first third of its Hora. Read literally, the text would grade Mars's effect as full and the Sun's as slight, even though both are in the Sun's Hora. The engine does not compute this grading. It is reported here as what the sloka says and as something you can work out from the degree in two lines of arithmetic.

A planet in its own Hora

Saravali Ch. 5 Sl. 28-30 runs through what a graha gives in exaltation, in its own sign and in a friendly sign, and ends with a short line: a planet in its own Hora makes one courageous. Only two grahas can ever be in their own Hora, since only the Sun and the Moon own one. In the sample both are. Saravali offers that as a trait of temperament, not of income, which is one reason this site does not turn the Hora into a money score.

The Hora rising at birth

Saravali Ch. 49 is devoted to the Hora of the Ascendant and gives a pair of descriptions for every sign, 24 in all. They are portraits of build and manner in the style of the period, not statements about wealth. For the first Hora of Leo, the one rising in the sample, the text describes a bold person of large frame who is firm in what he undertakes; for the second Hora of Leo, a liberal person fond of food, fine clothes and travel who is firm in friendship. For the first half of Virgo it describes a soft-spoken person fond of music; for the second half of Sagittarius, someone learned in the shastras and well-spoken.

Two cautions belong with that chapter. First, many of its portraits include physical features and unflattering character labels that no birth-time cut of a few minutes could responsibly assign to a living person; this site does not show them as a reading. Second, the chapter closes with its own condition in Sl. 25: the good effects of a Hora come in full only if the Sun or the Moon strongly aspects the Ascendant lord, or the Ascendant lord is itself in an angle. In the sample the Ascendant lord is the Sun, placed in the twelfth house, which is not an angle. Saravali's own test would therefore discount the portrait.

Hora as one clause in longer rules

Both texts also use the Hora as a single condition inside larger combinations. BPHS Ch. 9 Sl. 13 and Saravali Ch. 10 Sl. 33-34 each name a Moon-ruled Hora on the Ascendant as one clause of an infancy combination that also requires a twilight birth and malefics in angles with the Moon. BPHS Ch. 39 Sl. 13-14 forms a Raj Yoga when the Shad Vargas of the Lagn, of which Hora is one, are all occupied or aspected by the same graha. BPHS Ch. 78 Sl. 5-6, on lost horoscopy, reads the Sun's northern or southern course from the first or second Hora of a query chart's Ascendant. The engine evaluates none of these. They are listed so that you know the Hora appears in the literature mostly as an ingredient and rarely as a verdict on its own.

Where the same ten answers are used elsewhere in this app

Vimshopaka Bala: one point of twenty

The Vimshopaka Bala calculator scores each of the seven classical grahas out of 20 across all sixteen divisions. BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 17-25 gives Hora a different weight in each of its four schemes: 2 of 20 in the six-varga scheme, 2 in the seven-varga, 1.5 in the ten-varga and 1 in the full sixteen-varga scheme. This app uses the sixteen-varga scheme, so the Hora row is worth 1 point. The engine takes the Hora sign from the same function this page calls, looks up the graha's dignity in Leo or Cancer, and awards that fraction of the point.

Because a Hora can only be Leo or Cancer, each graha's Hora row has only two possible outcomes per chart. A graha in the first half of an odd sign scores exactly what a graha in the second half of an even sign scores. The engine also notes that a varga places a graha in a sign and not at a degree, so the Moolatrikona range is tested at degree zero; the Sun's range in Leo starts at zero, so the Sun in a Leo Hora is labelled Moolatrikona and earns the full point (until October 2026 the range was coded as 20 to 30 and it earned 0.75). The friendship labels can differ between charts because the engine combines natural friendship with the temporary friendship read from the birth chart.

Sapt Vargaj Bal in Shad Bala

BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 2-4 counts Hora again in positional strength: a graha earns a graded number of virupas for its dignity in the Rasi, and the same grading is repeated for six more divisions, Hora among them, to give Sapt Vargaj Bal. That is the classical place of D2 inside Shad Bala. The same chapter's Hora Bal, in Sl. 13, is the planetary hour of birth and has nothing to do with the half-sign.

Choosing an alternate dasha

The most concrete use is in BPHS Ch. 46. Sl. 23-26 say the Shodshottari dasha may be adopted for a day birth in the dark fortnight or a night birth in the bright fortnight, and also when the Lagn is in the Moon's Hora with birth in Krishna Paksha, or in the Sun's Hora with birth in Shukla Paksha. The alternate dashas calculator evaluates that condition, reading the Ascendant's Hora lord from this page's function. For the sample it returns that Shodshottari applies, with the stated facts: day birth, Shukla Paksha, Ascendant in the Sun's Hora. The day-and-night clause alone would not have qualified this chart; the Hora clause does.

Sl. 42-43 of the same chapter use the Hora once more, preferring the Shat-trimshat-sama dasha for a day birth with the Lagn in the Sun's Hora or a night birth with the Lagn in the Moon's. The engine's fit check reads the Hora for both Shodshottari and Shat-trimshat-sama. The Shodshottari rule also depends on the fortnight, which the moon phase calculator reports, and both are conditional systems; the default timeline everywhere on this site remains the Vimshottari dasha.

The Kundali reading

The signed-in Kundali feature computes the Hora with the same function when it assembles a chart, alongside Navamsa, Drekkana and the other divisions. There is one engine and one rule; the public calculator and the full reading cannot give different Horas for the same birth.

How sensitive is the result to birth time?

The page's limits say the rising degree sweeps the zodiac in a day and the grahas move far more slowly. A minute-by-minute run of the engine for the sample date at Ahmedabad shows what that means in practice. The Ascendant's Hora lord changed twelve times in the 24 hours, not twenty-four, because of the blocks described earlier: each time the Ascendant crossed a sign boundary the lord stayed the same, and only the midpoints changed it.

Each stretch lasted between about 90 minutes and 136 minutes on that date. The short ones fell in the evening, when Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces were rising, and the long ones through the night and morning. Signs do not rise at an even pace at a given latitude, so there is no single figure for how long a Hora lasts; two hours is a fair average and nothing more.

The sample birth at 06:42 sits inside the Sun stretch that ran from 05:24 to 07:38. That is 78 minutes of margin on one side and 56 on the other. Compare that with the rising sign: Leo began rising at 06:32, only ten minutes before the birth. A recorded time that was ten minutes late would move this person's Lagna from Leo to Cancer, and the Hora lord would not change at all, because the second half of Cancer and the first half of Leo are both the Sun's. The reverse case exists too. A birth near 07:38 keeps its rising sign whichever way the clock errs and can still fall on either side of the Hora line.

So the practical test is simple. Look at the Ascendant's degree in the birth chart. If it is close to 15, the Hora of the Ascendant is uncertain by exactly as much as the birth time is, at roughly four minutes of clock time for each degree. If it is close to 0 or 30, the Hora is stable even though the rising sign is not. The same reasoning applies to the Navamsa, whose parts are 3 degrees 20 minutes wide and therefore far more fragile; the Hora is the least time-sensitive of all the divisions precisely because it is the coarsest.

The grahas over a single day

The Moon is the fastest of the nine. Over the sample date it moved from 20.70 degrees of Libra at midnight to 4.80 degrees of Scorpio at the end of the day. It changed sign during the day and its Hora lord did not: the second half of Libra and the first half of Scorpio are both the Moon's. The Moon needs a little over a day to cross a 15-degree half, so on most dates its Hora is settled by the date alone. The Sun takes about a fortnight per Hora, and the slower grahas far longer.

That raises a fair question about the calculator's behaviour. The engine function itself would return the nine grahas' Horas for a chart with no Ascendant. The public calculator, however, is registered as needing an Ascendant, so with no birth time or no resolved place it returns a message naming what is missing and shows no table at all, as the first of the page's limits says. The choice is deliberate: the Ascendant row is the one the Shodshottari rule and Saravali Ch. 49 both read. If you do not have a time, the article on an unknown birth time explains which readings survive without one.

What a Hora result cannot contain

It helps to be exact about what is absent, because other divisional pages on this site carry features that this one never will.

• No houses. With only Leo and Cancer in play there is no twelve-sign wheel, so no graha has a house position in the Hora and no house lord can be traced through it.
• No vargottama flag. Other vargas mark a point that keeps its birth sign in the division, as the Navamsa article explains. The engine returns no such flag for the Hora; each point is a lord and a sign and nothing else.
• No aspects or conjunctions. Five points in the Sun's Hora are not five grahas conjunct in Leo. They are five points that each sit in a Sun-ruled half of five possibly different signs.
• No score, rank or forecast. The calculator returns ten labels. Any weighing happens elsewhere, in the Vimshopaka row shown above, and that row is worth one point of twenty.
• No reading for the nodes. Rahu and Ketu receive a lord because the geometry gives one, and they are left out of the Vimshopaka score because the engine keeps no dignity table for them.

The count of Sun against Moon is likewise only a count. The sample splits five and five. A chart that splits eight and two is not shown by either source to be richer, poorer, bolder or milder for it; the texts speak about individual grahas in their fitting Hora and about the Hora of the Ascendant, never about a majority. If money and work are the question, the career and money calculator reads the houses and lords that actually carry those topics in the Rasi chart.

How this page fits with the rest of the site

• Start from the birth chart for the signs and degrees every Hora is derived from, and the Lagna calculator for the rising degree and how it is computed.
• The neighbouring divisions use the same inputs with finer cuts: Drekkana (D3) in thirds, Navamsa (D9) in ninths, and Trimshamsa (D30), the only other division here that returns lords without a house wheel.
• For how the positions themselves are calculated and what is approximated, read the methodology page; for the texts quoted here, the sources page.
• The two signs a Hora can resolve to have their own articles: Leo (Simha), the Sun's sign, and Cancer (Karka), the Moon's.

Further questions

Why does the result only ever say Leo or Cancer?

Because BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 5-6 gives a Hora only two possible rulers, the Sun and the Moon, and each of them owns exactly one sign. The engine returns the lord and that lord's sign together. Leo simply means the Sun's half and Cancer the Moon's; no graha has moved to those signs.

My Ascendant is at about 15 degrees. Which Hora is right?

The engine puts anything below 15.00 in the first half and 15.00 or more in the second, after rounding the degree to two decimals. Near that line the answer depends on the birth minute and on the ayanamsa. On the sample date, four minutes of clock time moved the Ascendant by roughly a degree. Check the degree on the Lagna calculator and treat a result within a degree or so of 15 as undecided unless the time is certified.

Can two people with the same rising sign have different Horas?

Yes. Every sign contains one Sun Hora and one Moon Hora, so two Leo Ascendants born about an hour apart can differ. The opposite also happens: a late Cancer Ascendant and an early Leo Ascendant share the Sun's Hora, as the sweep table on this page shows for the stretch from 05:24 to 07:38.

Does a graha in its fitting Hora mean I will be wealthy?

No source used here says that. BPHS Ch. 7 says wealth is the subject considered from the Hora and names which grahas are effective in which half. It gives no amount, no threshold and no promise, and it grades the effect down to nil toward the end of a Hora. The calculator reports the placement and leaves it there.

Why is Mercury listed as effective in both Horas?

That is what BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 13-16 states: Jupiter, the Sun and Mars for the Sun's Hora, the Moon, Venus and Saturn for the Moon's, and Mercury for both. The text gives no reason in that passage, so none is offered here.

How much does the Hora change my Vimshopaka score?

At most one point of twenty in the sixteen-varga scheme this app uses. In the sample the seven Hora rows earned between 0 and 1. The Rasi (3.5), Navamsa (3) and Shashtiamsa (4) carry far more weight. Open the Vimshopaka Bala calculator to see all sixteen rows for each graha.

Is the Hora of the Ascendant the same as Hora Lagna?

No. The Hora of the Ascendant is the half of the rising sign that the rising degree falls in. Hora Lagn, in BPHS Ch. 5 Sl. 4-5, is a separate point found by advancing from the Sun's longitude at sunrise by one sign for every 60 minutes elapsed until birth. This calculator computes the first and not the second.

Will other software give me the same Hora?

For points well inside a half, yes, since the rule has no variants in the sources used here. Differences can arise only close to the 15-degree line, from a different ayanamsa, from a true-node setting for Rahu where this app uses the mean node, or from the precision of the positions. The methodology page states what this engine computes and what it approximates.

Does the Hora matter for horary questions?

BPHS Ch. 78 Sl. 5-6 uses the Hora of a query chart's Ascendant to infer the Sun's course at a forgotten birth, as part of reconstructing a lost horoscope. The Prashna feature on this site does not apply that rule; it is mentioned only as one of the classical uses of the division.