Saptavimshamsa D27 Chart

What this section adds

The calculator above returns a D27 sign for the Ascendant and each of the nine grahas, twelve houses counted from the D27 Lagna, and a list of points that keep their Rasi sign. The notes under it give the arithmetic in two paragraphs. This section goes further: what the source text says and where it stops, the full table of twenty-seven parts for each element, why this chart is called the Nakshatramsa and how to find a D27 sign straight from a nakshatra pada, the twenty-seven deity names the engine does not return, a point-by-point walk through the sample chart, what D27 adds to the sixteen-chart strength score, and how quickly the D27 Lagna moves with the clock. Every number below comes from the same engine that runs the calculator.

The classical rule, and where it is written

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra lists sixteen divisions of a sign in Ch. 6, Sl. 2-4. Saptavimshamsa is the twelfth name, after Chaturvimshamsa (D24) and before Trimshamsa (D30). Its rule is in Sl. 24-26, and the text gives it two other names in the heading itself: Nakshatramsa and Bhamsa. The passage does three things. It says the lords of the twenty-seven parts are the presiding deities of the twenty-seven nakshatras and lists them. It says the list runs in reverse order for an even sign. And it closes with one sentence about where the count of signs begins: the distribution commences from Mesh and other movable signs, for all the twelve signs.

That last sentence is short, and how it is read decides every sign the calculator shows. There are four movable signs - Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn - and twelve signs to share them among. The engine reads the sentence by element: a fire sign counts from Aries, an earth sign from Cancer, an air sign from Libra, a water sign from Capricorn. The page's notes already state that rule. What they do not say is that this app once read the sentence differently, as 'always from Aries', and was corrected. The comment above the rule in the code records why: 'always Aries' leaves the words 'and other movable signs' with nothing to do, and it cannot be produced by any continuous count. The by-element reading can.

It also helps to see what the text does not make this rule depend on. D24, one verse earlier, picks its starting sign by odd and even (Leo or Cancer). Shodashamsa (D16) and Vimshamsa (D20) pick theirs by modality. D27 uses neither. Odd and even matter in Sl. 24-26 only for the order of the deity names, and the engine's own notes on the chapter make the same point for every varga: where an even sign changes the sign count, BPHS says so by naming a different starting sign, never by counting backwards.

The other classical texts in this app's library were searched for this division under all three names. Saravali, the Bhrigu Sutras and the modern case-study book the app draws on do not discuss it, so everything classical on this page rests on BPHS alone. The full list of texts is on the sources page.

The twenty-seven parts, element by element

One part is a twenty-seventh of 30 degrees: 1 degree, 6 minutes and 40 seconds of arc. Three parts make 3 degrees 20 minutes, which is one Navamsa. The table below is the whole rule written out. Find the row that holds your point's degree within its Rasi sign, then read across to the column for that sign's element.

The engine does this lookup with one division and one addition. It takes the degree within the sign, divides by the arc of one part, drops the fraction to get a number from 0 to 26, adds that to the starting sign for the element and wraps past Pisces back to Aries.

Why it is called the Nakshatramsa

BPHS names this division after the nakshatras and gives its parts the nakshatra deities. The arithmetic shows a closer tie than the name alone. A nakshatra is 13 degrees 20 minutes wide. Divide that by one D27 part and you get exactly twelve. So every nakshatra holds twelve Saptavimshamsa parts, and because the count through the zodiac is unbroken from 0 degrees Aries, those twelve parts are always the twelve signs in order, Aries to Pisces. Each of the twenty-seven nakshatras starts the count again at Aries. Put another way: the D27 sign of a point is its position inside its own nakshatra, measured in twelfths. This is a consequence of the engine's rule, not a quotation from the text, and you can check it against any result the calculator gives you with the nakshatra calculator open beside it.

A pada is a quarter of a nakshatra, 3 degrees 20 minutes, so it holds three parts. That gives a shortcut that needs no degree table at all:

The sample chart confirms it point by point. Its Moon is in Vishakha, 2nd pada, and its D27 sign is Leo, the middle of the second row. Its Ascendant is in Magha, 1st pada, and lands in Gemini. Jupiter in Swati, 3rd pada, is in Libra; the Sun in Ashlesha, 4th pada, is in Capricorn; Saturn in Shatabhisha, 3rd pada, is in Sagittarius. One thing follows that is worth knowing before you read your own chart: a pada is also one Navamsa, so a point's Navamsa (D9) sign tells you the pada, and D27 then splits that pada into three. D27 is a finer cut of the same ruler the Navamsa uses, which is why the two charts tighten and loosen together when a birth time is uncertain. The background on the nakshatra grid itself is in the Moon, the nakshatra and the rashi.

The twenty-seven presiding deities

BPHS Ch. 6, Sl. 24-26 names a deity for each part: the presiding deities of the twenty-seven nakshatras, in nakshatra order, for an odd sign (Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius), and the same list counted in reverse for an even sign (Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Pisces). The table reproduces the list in the spelling of the translation this app uses. Two details are reproduced as printed and not corrected here: the name Varuna appears twice, at the twentieth and the twenty-fourth places, and the last name is printed as Pushya. With twenty-seven names, the fourteenth, Tvasht, sits in the middle and is the same for odd and even signs.

What BPHS reads from this chart, and how little it says

The use of each division is given in one long sentence in Ch. 7, Sl. 1-8: the physique from the Lagna, wealth from Hora, co-born from Drekkana, and so on down the list. For this division the whole instruction is five words in translation: strength and weakness from Saptavimshamsa. Nothing more specific follows. The text does not say whose strength, bodily or otherwise, it does not give a rule for judging it from a house or a lord, and it offers no worked case.

So this page will not tell you that a graha in a particular D27 house makes you strong or weak in some named way. That would be this app's invention, not Parashara's. What can honestly be said is narrower. Three statements in the same two chapters apply to every division, D27 included, and they are the only classical handles on this chart that the app's library provides.

1. 1.The dignity of the sign a graha occupies in the division counts. Ch. 6, Sl. 42-53 calls a division 'good' when it falls in the graha's exaltation sign, Moolatrikona sign or own sign (the verse adds signs owned by the lord of a Kendra from the Arudha Lagna). A graha is then named by how many good divisions it holds across a scheme. In the sixteen-division scheme the names run from Bhedak for two up to Sri Vallabh for all sixteen.
2. 2.The same verses set a condition: the divisions of a combust graha, a defeated graha, a weak graha and one in a bad Avastha are not to be counted as auspicious. A good D27 sign is therefore not a free-standing credit. It is read after the graha's state in the birth chart.
3. 3.Position inside the division matters. Ch. 7, Sl. 13-16 says the effects are full at the beginning, medium in the middle and nil at the end of a Hora, and that 'similar applications' are to be made for the other divisions. For D27 the beginning, middle and end are each about 22 minutes of arc.

The calculator on this page applies none of the three. It does not count good divisions, it does not test for combustion, and it does not grade a point by where it sits inside its part. It reports signs, houses and own-sign matches. The first of the three is, however, used elsewhere in the app, in the Vimshopaka Bala calculator, and that is the one place where your D27 signs are turned into a number.

The sample chart, point by point

The page's example is a birth on 14 August 1994 at 06:42 IST in Ahmedabad. The example note above gives the result in a sentence. Here is the working behind every row, from the engine's own output: the sidereal degree within the Rasi sign, the nakshatra and pada, the part that degree falls in, and the count from the element's starting sign.

Take the Moon as the model. It is at 24.64 degrees of Libra. Part 23 runs from 24 degrees 26 minutes 40 seconds to 25 degrees 33 minutes 20 seconds, so the Moon is in the twenty-third part, twenty-two steps past the first. Libra is an air sign and counts from Libra itself. Twenty-two signs on from Libra is one full round of twelve and ten more, which is Leo. The D27 Lagna is Gemini, and Leo is the third sign from Gemini, so the Moon is in the 3rd house of this chart. Venus shows the earth rule: 12.92 degrees of Virgo is the twelfth part, eleven steps on from Cancer, which is Gemini - the same sign as the D27 Lagna, so Venus is in the 1st.

Three things in this table repay a second look. First, the Moon and Rahu share a nakshatra pada and a part, so they share a D27 sign; that is conjunction carried through, not coincidence. Second, Mercury and Ketu also share a D27 sign, Aquarius, yet they come from two different Rasi signs and two different elements - Cancer and Aries. Nothing joins them in the birth chart. Each simply happens to be in the middle third of the 4th pada of its nakshatra, and the pada table sends all such points to Aquarius. A cluster in D27 is not evidence of a conjunction in the sky. Third, Mars is at 4.42 degrees of Gemini and the fifth part begins at 4 degrees 26 minutes 40 seconds, which is 4.44 degrees. Mars is about one and a half minutes of arc short of that boundary, still in the fourth part. That is taken up under limits below, because it is the kind of placement another tool can legitimately report differently.

Reading each kind of result

The D27 sign of a point

This is the primary output, and by the nakshatra arithmetic above it is a statement about where the point sits inside its nakshatra. The classical way to weigh it is dignity: is this sign the graha's exaltation, own, friendly, neutral, enemy or debilitation sign? The calculator does not print the dignity beside the sign. You can read it off yourself, or use the strength calculator, which does so for the seven grahas from Sun to Saturn. Rahu and Ketu get a D27 sign here but no dignity anywhere in this app, because its dignity table gives them no sign to own.

The D27 Lagna and the twelve houses

The D27 sign of the Ascendant is treated as the 1st house, and the other eleven follow in zodiac order, one whole sign per house. A graha's house is counted from that sign. BPHS Ch. 7, Sl. 33-36 defines the house groups that any chart is read with - Kendras (1, 4, 7, 10), Kons or trines (5, 9), and the Dusthanas (6, 8, 12) - and those definitions are what a reader would bring to this wheel. In the sample, Venus is in the 1st and Saturn in the 7th, both Kendras; Jupiter in the 5th and three points in the 9th are in trines; the Sun is in the 8th, a Dusthana. Stating which group a graha falls in is as far as the sources allow. BPHS gives no house-by-house results for D27, so this page gives none. The house column is also the most fragile part of the result, since it depends entirely on the Ascendant degree.

Points that keep their Rasi sign

The calculator lists any point whose D27 sign equals its Rasi sign and labels the list with the word vargottama. The engine's test is a plain comparison of the two sign indices. It is worth being exact about the word: in classical usage Vargottama means the same sign in the Rasi and the Navamsa. A match between the Rasi and D27 is the same arithmetic idea applied to a different division, and BPHS does not attach the Navamsa Vargottama results to it. Treat the list as a fact about the placements. The table shows where in each sign a point must be for the match to occur.

Twenty-eight of the 324 parts in the zodiac return to their own sign, a little under one in eleven. With ten points in a chart, finding one match, as the sample does with Jupiter in the thirteenth part of Libra, is about what chance alone would give. Finding none is equally ordinary.

When no chart is returned

The handler for this page is declared as needing an Ascendant. Without a birth time, or with a place that has not resolved to coordinates, it returns no chart at all and says what is missing. It does not fall back to a list of graha signs without houses, even though the engine could compute those. More on that position is in what you can still read without a birth time.

What D27 contributes to the twenty-point strength score

BPHS Ch. 7 describes four schemes for combining divisions into a strength out of twenty, called Vimshopaka Bala. Saptavimshamsa is absent from the first three. The six-division scheme (Sl. 17-19) uses Rasi, Hora, Drekkana, Navamsa, Dwadasamsa and Trimshamsa; the seven-division scheme adds Saptamsa; the ten-division scheme (Sl. 20) adds Dashamsa, Shodashamsa and Shashtiamsa. D27 enters only in the full sixteen-division scheme of Sl. 21-25, where the Rasi carries 3.5 points, the Navamsa 3, the Shodashamsa 2, the Shashtiamsa 4, three divisions 1 each, and 'the rest of the nine divisions each a half'. D27 is one of those nine. Its ceiling is half a point in twenty: two and a half per cent of the score.

The engine implements the sixteen-division scheme. For each of the seven grahas it takes the D27 sign, grades its dignity, and awards a share of the half point: all of it for an exaltation sign, three quarters for an own sign, five eighths for a friendly sign, half for a neutral sign, and nothing for an enemy or debilitation sign. Friendship here is the compound relation, which blends the natural friendships with where the two grahas sit in the birth chart, so the same D27 sign can grade differently in two charts. For the sample person the D27 rows come out like this.

Two lessons sit in that table. Jupiter is the one graha on the own-sign list, and it earns a quarter of a point from D27, less than Mars, the Moon or Venus. Keeping the Rasi sign is not the same as being well placed: Libra is not Jupiter's sign, and returning to it in D27 simply repeats a neutral placement. And the largest D27 contribution in the chart, Mars's full half point for exaltation in Capricorn, moves a total by half a point on a scale where the bands are five points wide (Sl. 26-27 put the lines at 5, 10 and 15). D27 can tip a graha across a band line only when it is already sitting on one. So the text's phrase, strength and weakness from Saptavimshamsa, should not be read as a claim that this chart alone measures strength. For a fuller measure on different principles the app has a separate Shad Bala calculator, which does not use D27 at all.

Birth-time sensitivity, measured

The limits above say that a birth time a few minutes out can change the D27 Lagna. Here is the measurement. The sample birth was recomputed every two minutes for the hour around 06:42, everything else held fixed. In that hour the Ascendant moved from 25.63 degrees of Cancer to 9.09 degrees of Leo, about 13.5 degrees, which is almost exactly one nakshatra - and so the D27 Lagna went once round the whole zodiac.

At this latitude and hour one D27 Lagna lasts about five minutes. The sample's Gemini Lagna holds at 06:42, 06:44 and 06:46 and is gone by 06:48; it was Taurus at 06:40. The speed of the Ascendant varies with the sign rising and the latitude, so the window is not five minutes everywhere, but it is of that order for any birth.

A change of Lagna renumbers every house while leaving the signs alone. At 06:48 the grahas are in the same D27 signs as at 06:42, but with Cancer rising Venus is in the 12th house instead of the 1st, Jupiter in the 4th instead of the 5th, the Moon in the 2nd instead of the 3rd, and Saturn in the 6th instead of the 7th. At 06:36, with Aries rising, Venus is in the 3rd and Jupiter in the 7th. A reader working from a hospital record rounded to the nearest five or ten minutes should treat the house column as undetermined and read the sign column only.

The grahas are steadier, in proportion to their speed. Across the same hour the Moon moved from 24.35 to 24.93 degrees of Libra, a little over half a degree, so one part lasts the Moon nearly two hours. It crossed a boundary inside the window: before about 06:23 its D27 sign is Cancer, after that Leo. Two hours either side of the sample time the Moon's D27 sign is Cancer (04:42) and Virgo (08:42). The Sun takes more than a day to cross one part, and the slow grahas far longer; Jupiter, Saturn and the nodes show the same D27 sign from 04:42 to 08:42.

Other limits worth knowing

• The ayanamsa moves everything. A D27 part is 66 minutes 40 seconds of arc, so a modest difference in ayanamsa carries a point across a boundary. This app uses Lahiri; the ayanamsa calculator shows the value for your date, and why two apps give two nakshatras explains the same disagreement one level up. If two tools disagree on your nakshatra pada, they will disagree on your D27 sign.
• Rahu and Ketu are computed from the mean node, with Ketu exactly opposite Rahu. Their D27 signs are returned like any other point's, but they take no part in the strength score.
• The positions are not from the Swiss Ephemeris. The methodology page states what the model is and how far it can be trusted; the finer a division, the more that limit matters, and D27 is among the finer ones this app computes.

Where D27 sits among the other charts

In the saved Kundali the same function runs alongside the other divisional charts and its output is stored with them, left empty when there is no Ascendant; that is the Kundali feature. On the public site, the charts most worth opening next to this one are these.

• The birth chart gives the Rasi signs and degrees every D27 placement is derived from. Read it first; a division refines a chart, it does not replace one.
• Navamsa (D9) is the coarser cut of the same grid: one Navamsa is three D27 parts. Navamsa, the second chart is the background; BPHS gives it 3 points to D27's half in the sixteen-division score.
• Nakshatra and nakshatra sub-lord divide the same 13°20' span in other ways - into four equal padas, and into nine unequal Vimshottari slices. D27 divides it into twelve equal ones. The three are different rulers laid over one length.
• Vimshopaka Bala is where the D27 sign is graded and weighed with the other fifteen divisions.
• Shashtiamsa (D60) and Khavedamsa (D40) are finer still, and need the birth time more exactly than D27 does.

If your Moon is one of the points you looked up, the page for its nakshatra gives the wider context the D27 sign sits inside - for the sample person that would be Vishakha, and for the sample Ascendant Magha. All the calculators are listed on the calculators index.

More questions

Can I work out my D27 sign without the calculator?

Yes, if you know the nakshatra pada and roughly where in the pada the point falls. The pada gives a row of three signs (1st pada Aries to Gemini, 2nd Cancer to Virgo, 3rd Libra to Sagittarius, 4th Capricorn to Pisces) and the third of the pada picks one. Or use the degree table on this page with the element of the Rasi sign. Both give the same answer as the engine; the nakshatra calculator supplies the pada.

Another site gives me different D27 signs for most planets. Which is right?

Look at which planets differ. If the planets in fire signs agree and those in earth, air and water signs do not, the other site is counting every sign from Aries. BPHS says the count commences from Mesh 'and other movable signs', and this app reads that by element, which is also the only reading that makes the count continuous through the zodiac. If the differences are scattered, the cause is more likely a different ayanamsa or a point sitting on a part boundary.

Does the D27 chart show how strong I am?

BPHS says strength and weakness are to be considered from this division and stops there. It gives no method for doing so, and this calculator does not supply one. The only place the app turns a D27 sign into a number is the sixteen-division strength score, where it carries half a point out of twenty per graha. Nothing here is a statement about your health or capacity, and none of it is medical advice.

Is a planet on the own-sign list strong in D27?

Not necessarily. The list records that the D27 sign equals the Rasi sign. Whether that sign suits the planet is a separate question of dignity. In the sample, Jupiter repeats Libra, a sign graded neutral for it in that chart, and earns less from D27 in the strength score than the Moon or Venus, which are not on the list.

How exact does my birth time need to be for the D27 houses?

In the worked example one D27 Lagna lasted about five minutes and the Lagna went through all twelve signs in an hour. A time known to the minute from a reliable record is enough to place it; a time rounded to the quarter hour is not. The D27 signs of the slower grahas do not depend on the time to that degree, and for anything slower than the Moon they hold for a day or more.

Is D27 part of the Shad Varga or Dasha Varga?

No. BPHS Ch. 7 builds the six-, seven- and ten-division schemes without it. It appears only in the Shodasha Varga, the full set of sixteen, as one of the nine divisions weighted at half a point each.