Saptamsa D7 Chart

What this page adds to the calculator above

The calculator above returns the D7 sign of your Ascendant and nine grahas, twelve houses counted from the D7 Lagna, and the points that keep their Rasi sign. The notes beside it give the arithmetic in two paragraphs. This longer section covers the rest: where the Saptamsa is defined in the classical texts, the full table of all 84 divisions, a line-by-line walk through one real chart, how to read each value the calculator can return, what the old authors used this chart for, and which of those uses this site deliberately leaves alone. Every number below was produced by running the same engine function the calculator calls.

Where the Saptamsa is defined

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra lists sixteen ways of dividing a sign in Ch. 6, and the Saptamsa is the fifth in that list, after the Rasi itself, the Hora (D2), the Drekkana (D3) and the Chaturthamsa (D4). The definition takes two slokas. BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 10-11 says a Saptamsa is one seventh of a sign, that the count begins from the sign itself when the sign is odd, and that it begins from the seventh sign from it when the sign is even. That single sentence is the entire rule. Everything the calculator does is an application of it.

Odd and even here refer to the sign's position in the zodiac counted from Aries as one. Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Aquarius are odd; Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces are even. So the seven parts of Aries run Aries, Taurus, Gemini and onward to Libra, while the seven parts of Taurus begin at Scorpio, the seventh sign from Taurus, and run forward until the last part lands on Taurus again.

Saravali states the same scheme in a different form. Ch. 3 Sl. 16 does not give a rule; it simply lists the starting sign for each of the twelve signs from Aries onward: Aries, Scorpio, Gemini, Capricorn, Leo, Pisces, Libra, Taurus, Sagittarius, Cancer, Aquarius and Virgo. Compare that list with the BPHS rule and the two agree sign for sign. Each odd sign starts from itself and each even sign from its opposite. Saravali adds that the lord of a Saptamsa is the lord of the sign it falls in, which is why the calculator reports a sign and not a separate ruler. On this varga the two texts in our corpus do not disagree, which is not true of every divisional chart.

BPHS also names the seven parts. The translation in our corpus gives the names for an odd sign as Kshaar, Ksheer, Dadhi, Ghrith, Ikshu Ras, Madhya and Suddh Jal, and says the order is reversed for an even sign. The translation does not gloss these names or attach any reading to them in that chapter, so this page does not either, and the calculator does not display them. They are mentioned here so that you recognise them if another tool shows a name beside each D7 placement.

All 84 Saptamsas in one table

Twelve signs of seven parts each make 84 divisions. The table below was generated from the engine's own starting-sign function, so it is exactly what the calculator uses. Read across from the Rasi sign of a point to the column of the part its degree falls in.

Three things are visible in the table. First, read row after row and the sequence never jumps: Aries ends on Libra and Taurus begins on Scorpio, Taurus ends on Taurus and Gemini begins on Gemini. The 84 parts go around the zodiac exactly seven times. Second, a sign appears in its own row only once, in the first column for odd signs and the last column for even signs; those are the only cells where a point keeps its Rasi sign. Third, every row covers seven consecutive signs, so five signs are always out of reach. A graha in Aries can never have a D7 sign of Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius or Pisces.

How the engine computes it, step by step

The calculator first builds the ordinary sidereal chart from your date, time and place, the same one shown by the birth chart calculator. Each point arrives with a sign and a degree within that sign. The Saptamsa step then needs nothing else. It is done by a shared routine, computeVarga, that this site also uses for D10 and D12; only the number of parts and the starting-sign function change.

1. 1.Width of a part. 30 degrees divided by 7 is 4.2857 degrees, or 4 degrees 17 minutes and about 9 seconds of arc.
2. 2.Which part. The degree within the sign is divided by that width and the fraction is dropped. A result of 0 means the first part, 6 the seventh. The result is capped at 6 so that a value rounding to exactly 30 degrees cannot produce an eighth part.
3. 3.Starting sign. If the Rasi sign is odd the start is the sign itself. If it is even the start is the sign six places further on, which is the seventh sign counted inclusively.
4. 4.D7 sign. The engine steps forward from the starting sign by the part number, wrapping from Pisces to Aries.
5. 5.Same-sign flag. If the D7 sign equals the Rasi sign, the point is added to the list of points that keep their sign.
6. 6.Houses. The D7 sign of the Ascendant becomes house 1 and the other eleven signs follow in order. Each graha's D7 house is the whole-sign count from that sign.

Two details of the method are worth knowing. The engine places a point in a D7 sign and stops; it does not assign a degree inside that sign. And the houses are whole-sign houses from the D7 Lagna, the same convention the Rasi chart on this site uses, so a D7 house is simply a count of signs.

A worked chart, line by line

The stored example on this page is a birth on 14 August 1994 at 06:42 in Ahmedabad. We ran it through the engine again for this section and added two columns the calculator does not show: the degree of each point within its Rasi sign and the number of the part it falls in. With those you can check every row against the table above by hand.

Take the Moon. It is in Libra at 24.64 degrees. Dividing 24.64 by 4.2857 gives 5.75; drop the fraction and the index is 5, the sixth part. Libra is the seventh sign, which is odd, so the count starts at Libra itself. Five steps on from Libra are Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. The D7 Moon is in Pisces. The D7 Lagna is Leo, and Pisces is the eighth sign from Leo, so the Moon is in D7 house 8.

Now an even sign. Venus is in Virgo at 12.92 degrees. 12.92 divided by 4.2857 is 3.01, so the index is 3, the fourth part. Virgo is the sixth sign, which is even, so the count starts at the seventh sign from Virgo, which is Pisces. Three steps on from Pisces are Aries, Taurus and Gemini. Venus is in Gemini in D7, the eleventh sign from Leo.

Mars shows how a small degree can still move a point a long way from its neighbours. It is in Gemini at 4.42 degrees, just past the first boundary at 4 degrees 17 minutes, so it is in the second part. Gemini is odd, the count starts at Gemini, and one step on is Cancer. That places Mars in the same D7 sign as the Sun and Mercury, which reached Cancer by a different route: both are in the seventh part of even Cancer, where the count that began at Capricorn comes back to Cancer itself.

Notice also that Jupiter, Venus and Saturn are all in the fourth part of their signs and still land in three different D7 signs, because their starting signs differ. The part number alone tells you nothing; it has to be combined with the Rasi sign.

How to read each thing the calculator returns

The D7 sign of a point

This is the core output: one of twelve signs for the Ascendant and each of the nine grahas. The classical use of a varga sign is to ask how well a graha is placed there. BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 42-53 counts a division as good when it falls in the graha's exaltation sign, its Mooltrikon sign or its own sign, and says the divisions of a combust, defeated or weak graha are not to be counted as auspicious. The calculator does not make that judgement for you on this page. The Vimshopaka Bala calculator does, and a later section shows the D7 row it produces for the sample chart.

The D7 house

Each graha also gets a house number from 1 to 12, counted in whole signs from the D7 Lagna. This number depends entirely on the D7 Lagna, and the D7 Lagna is the most time-sensitive value on the page. Treat a D7 house as reliable only as far as your birth time is reliable. The D7 sign of a graha is far steadier, because it does not depend on the Lagna at all.

Points that keep their Rasi sign

The calculator lists every point whose D7 sign equals its Rasi sign. In the engine this flag is named vargottama, the same flag used for the Navamsa (D9). The classical term is tied to the Navamsa specifically, so on this page it is best read as a plain structural fact: the point sits in the first seventh of an odd sign or the last seventh of an even sign. In the sample chart three points qualify. None of them repeats its sign in D9, where the Ascendant falls in Aries and the Sun and Mercury in Pisces. Repeating a sign in one varga says nothing about another.

The twelve houses

The house list is the twelve signs in zodiac order starting from the D7 Lagna. For the sample that is Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini and Cancer. Several grahas can share a house, and several houses can be empty. In the sample, house 12 holds three grahas and house 8 holds two, while houses 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 hold none. With only seven sign-steps available inside each Rasi sign, clusters like this are common and carry no special meaning on their own.

When the calculator declines to answer

This calculator is registered as needing an Ascendant. If you give no birth time, it does not fall back to a noon chart; it returns an unavailable result that names the birth time as the missing piece and says that without it there are no houses to read. If you give a time but the place cannot be resolved to coordinates, it names the birth place instead. No D7 chart is drawn in either case. If you do not know your time, our guide to charts without a birth time explains what can still be computed.

What the classical texts use the D7 for

BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 1-8 assigns one subject to each of the sixteen divisions: the physique from the Lagna, wealth from the Hora, co-born from the Drekkana, and so on. For the Saptamsa the phrase is sons and grandsons. In the same list the spouse is read from the Navamsa, power and position from the Dashamsa (D10) and parents from the Dwadasamsa (D12). That one phrase is the whole of what BPHS says, in this chapter, about what the D7 is for. It does not give a method for reading the chart house by house.

The detailed rules about children in BPHS sit elsewhere, and they are rules about the Rasi chart. Ch. 11 Sl. 6 lists the indications of the fifth house, Putr Bhava: learning, knowledge, sacred spells, authority and sons among them. Ch. 16 then judges the matter from the fifth house, its lord and the Lagna lord: where the lord sits, whether it is strong, and which grahas aspect the house. The Saptamsa is a second view of a question the text first asks of the Rasi chart. Our page on the fifth house, Putra Bhava covers that primary layer, and the Jupiter page covers the graha most often associated with it.

Saravali uses the Saptamsa in three places in our corpus. In Ch. 5 Sl. 31-33, a passage that goes through the effect of a planet being in its own division of each kind, it says a planet in its own Saptamsa gives courage, wealth and fame. That is a statement about the graha's strength, not about children. In Ch. 34, the chapter on the fifth house, one rule on adoption includes the condition that the house falls in a Saptamsa owned by Mars; the division is being used there as a fine modifier on a fifth-house rule, not as a chart read on its own. And Ch. 51 Sl. 110 closes its long account of divisions by saying that for divisions not separately explained, the effects related to the Saptamsas apply.

A modern case-study book in our corpus, Advanced Predictive Astrology, turns the idea into a timing rule. In a list of difficult periods read from divisional charts, it says that the dasha or sub-period of a planet debilitated in the Saptamsa brings unhappiness regarding progeny, alongside parallel statements for the Dashamsa and career and for the Navamsa and married life. This is one author's working rule and it is reported here as such. This site does not apply it: neither this calculator nor the Vimshottari dasha calculator combines D7 dignity with dasha periods.

The Saptamsa as a measure of strength

The second classical use of the D7 has nothing to do with its subject. It is one of the divisions used to measure how well placed a graha is overall. BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 17-19 begins with six divisions, the Shad Varga, and then says that adding the Saptamsa to those six makes the Sapt Varga, the group of seven. The Saptamsa is literally the division that turns six into seven. The sloka gives seven weights for that group, 5, 2, 3, 2.5, 4.5, 2 and 1, which total 20. Read in order of division size, the Saptamsa's share is 2.5 of the 20.

This site's Vimshopaka Bala uses the sixteen-division scheme, so the Saptamsa carries 0.5 points of 20, the same as the Chaturthamsa, Dashamsa and Dwadasamsa. The engine checks at load time that its sixteen weights total exactly 20. For each of the seven grahas from the Sun to Saturn it finds the dignity of the graha in its D7 sign and awards a share of that half point: all of it for exaltation, three quarters for an own sign, five eighths for a friendly sign, half for a neutral sign and nothing for an enemy sign or debilitation. Rahu and Ketu are left out because the engine keeps no dignity table for them.

The table puts the D7 in proportion. Mars and Jupiter are both debilitated in their D7 signs in this chart, and each loses half a point of twenty for it. The Moon earns nothing from its D7 sign and still has the second-highest total of the seven, behind Venus, because the Rasi, Navamsa and Shashtiamsa carry far more weight. The friendship used for these labels is the compound one, which mixes the permanent relationships with the temporary ones read from the birth chart, so the same graha in the same D7 sign can be labelled differently in two different charts.

The Saptamsa also appears in the older six-fold strength system. BPHS Ch. 27 Sl. 2-4 defines Sapt Vargaj Bal, one component of positional strength, as a sum of dignity scores across seven divisions, and names the Saptamsa among them with the Rasi, Hora, Drekkana, Navamsa, Dwadasamsa and Trimsamsa. The Shad Bala calculator documents which components this site computes; the point here is only that classical authors treated the D7 as a routine input to strength, not as a chart reserved for one subject.

One more refinement from BPHS deserves a mention because the engine does not apply it. Ch. 7 Sl. 13-16 says a graha gives full, medium and nil effects at the beginning, middle and end of a Hora, and that the same is to be applied to the other divisions. Since the engine keeps no degree within the D7 sign, it treats a graha just inside a part and a graha about to leave it identically.

How sensitive the D7 is to birth time

The note above the calculator says a modest error can move the D7 Lagna. To put numbers on that, we recomputed the sample chart every ten seconds across the whole birth date. The D7 Lagna took 84 different positions over the 24 hours, one for each seventh of each rising sign. The shortest lasted 12 minutes 50 seconds, late in the evening with Aquarius rising, and the longest 19 minutes 40 seconds, before dawn with Cancer rising. The spans differ because signs rise at different speeds at a given latitude.

The sample birth at 06:42 sits inside the Leo span that runs from 06:31:40 to 06:50:50. Had the birth actually happened nine minutes later than recorded, the D7 Lagna would be Virgo; eleven minutes earlier, Cancer. Either change moves every graha to a different D7 house while leaving its D7 sign untouched. A birth time rounded to the nearest quarter of an hour, which is common on older records, is not precise enough to be sure of the D7 Lagna.

The grahas are steadier, but not all equally. Across the same date the Sun, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Rahu kept one D7 sign from midnight to midnight. Mars and Venus did not. Each crossed a boundary in the small hours, Mars at 01:54 and Venus at 05:16, so at 06:42 Mars at 4.42 degrees of Gemini and Venus at 12.92 degrees of Virgo were each only a fraction of a degree past one; at the start of the day both were still in the previous part, Mars with a D7 sign of Gemini and Venus with Taurus. The Moon changed D7 sign four times in the day, from Aquarius to Pisces at 01:15, to Aries at 08:32, to Taurus at 15:49 when it entered Scorpio, and to Gemini at 23:07. The Moon covers a seventh of a sign in roughly seven to eight hours, so its D7 sign needs a birth time good to the hour or so, while its Rasi sign often needs only the date. The Lagna calculator shows how close your own Ascendant is to a sign boundary, which is the first thing to check.

Limits worth keeping in mind

• Boundary cases. The positions are computed by this site's built-in formulas, described on the methodology page. A point within a few minutes of arc of one of the six internal boundaries may land in the neighbouring part in other software, and the D7 sign changes with it. Differences in ayanamsa have the same effect: a shift of a few minutes of arc is enough near a boundary.
• One starting rule. The engine implements the rule of BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 10-11, which Saravali Ch. 3 Sl. 16 confirms. It does not offer alternative Saptamsa schemes, and this page makes no claim about what other traditions use.
• No degrees inside the D7. A point is placed in a D7 sign only. Anything that needs a degree within the divisional sign, including the beginning-middle-end grading of BPHS Ch. 7 Sl. 13-16, is not computed.
• No aspects or conjunction readings. The calculator lists which grahas share a D7 sign but does not compute aspects in the D7 or interpret any combination.
• No interpretation. There is no reading attached to a D7 Lagna, to a graha in a D7 house, or to a house lord. BPHS gives the D7 a subject, not a house-by-house manual, and this site does not supply one from elsewhere.
• Nodes. Rahu is the mean node and Ketu is always exactly opposite, so the two always occupy opposite D7 signs. A tool using the true node can differ when Rahu is near a boundary.

How the D7 connects to the rest of the site

The same Saptamsa chart appears in the full Kundali feature whenever the chart has an Ascendant, drawn as a wheel beside the D9, D10 and D12. The free birth chart tool gives the Rasi positions that the D7 is derived from, and it is worth reading the two side by side, since every D7 placement is a function of one Rasi sign and one degree.

If you want to see the divisional charts as a set, the Navamsa is the natural next step, and Navamsa, the second chart explains why it carries six times the weight of the D7 in the sixteen-varga scheme. The Dashamsa uses an almost identical rule, counting from the ninth sign for even signs where the D7 counts from the seventh. For a view of how confident any of these outputs can be given your birth details, see the accuracy feature, and for the texts themselves, the sources page.

Questions people ask about the Saptamsa

Why does my D7 Lagna differ from what another app shows?

The usual cause is a small difference in the Ascendant's degree. Each D7 Lagna lasts between about 13 and 20 minutes of clock time in the sample sweep, so a difference of a few minutes in the recorded time, or of a few minutes of arc in the ayanamsa or the calculation, is enough to cross a boundary. Compare the Ascendant degree in both tools first. If the degrees agree and the D7 signs still differ, the other tool is using a different starting rule.

Can I use this calculator without a birth time?

No. It is registered as needing an Ascendant and returns an unavailable result that names the birth time as missing. We could show D7 signs for the slower grahas from the date alone, but the Moon changed D7 sign four times in the sample date and Venus once, and there would be no houses at all, so the page does not offer a partial chart.

Is the D7 more important than the fifth house of the birth chart?

Not in the sources we hold. BPHS gives the Saptamsa one phrase in Ch. 7 and gives the fifth house a full chapter of rules in Ch. 16, all stated for the Rasi chart. In the sixteen-varga strength scheme the Rasi carries 3.5 points of 20 and the Saptamsa 0.5. The D7 is a supporting view. Start with the fifth house.

What does it mean if a planet is debilitated in D7?

Mechanically, it means the seventh of the sign it occupies maps to its debilitation sign. In this site's Vimshopaka Bala it then earns none of the half point the D7 carries. One modern book in our corpus links the dasha of such a planet to difficulty concerning children; the classical texts we hold do not state that rule, and this site does not apply it. In the sample chart two grahas are debilitated in D7 and the calculator reports that as a placement, nothing more.

Why can a planet in Aries never be in Scorpio in D7?

Because there are only seven parts in a sign and the count moves one sign per part. From Aries the seven parts reach Aries through Libra and stop. Every Rasi sign reaches exactly seven consecutive D7 signs and cannot reach the other five. The table of 84 divisions above shows which seven for each sign.

Why do the Sun and Mercury share a D7 sign so often?

They do not have to, but Mercury is never far from the Sun in the sky, so the two are frequently in the same Rasi sign and sometimes within the same seventh of it. In the sample they are 1.17 degrees apart, both in the last part of Cancer. Had Mercury been four degrees further back, it would have been in the sixth part, with a D7 sign of Gemini.

Are the seven named parts, Kshaar, Ksheer and the rest, shown anywhere?

No. BPHS Ch. 6 Sl. 10-11 names them and says the order reverses for an even sign, but the translation we work from attaches no reading to the names in that chapter. The engine stores only the D7 sign. If a meaning for each name is given in another tool, it comes from a source outside our corpus.

Does a planet that keeps its sign in D7 count as vargottama?

The engine uses the same flag name for every divisional chart, so the field is called vargottama in the output. Classically the term belongs to the Navamsa. On this page it is safer to read the flag literally: the point is in the first seventh of an odd sign or the last seventh of an even sign. Saravali's statement about a planet in its own Saptamsa, in Ch. 5, concerns a planet in a D7 sign that it rules, which is a different condition.

How is the D7 different from the D10 on this site?

Only in two numbers. The D7 cuts a sign into seven parts and starts even signs from the seventh sign; the D10 cuts it into ten and starts even signs from the ninth. Both run through the same routine and both carry half a point in Vimshopaka Bala. BPHS assigns them different subjects: children to the D7, power and position to the D10.