Trimshamsa D30 Lords

What this section adds

The calculator above already gives you the rule in brief, a sample result and three short answers. This section is the longer account: where the rule is written and what the classical texts say it is for, the full band table for both kinds of sign, what the engine does at each step, how to read each of the three values it returns, and how much a wrong birth time changes them, measured on a real chart. Every figure quoted here was produced by running the same engine function this page calls. The reasoning behind the wider approach is on the methodology page, and the books are listed under sources.

The classical rule, and where it is written

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra opens its sixth chapter with Maitreya asking for the divisions of a sign, and Parashara names sixteen of them (Ch. 6, Sloka 2-4). Trimshamsa is the thirteenth name in that list, between Saptavimshamsa and Khavedamsa. The word means a thirtieth part, so one Trimshamsa is one degree of a thirty-degree sign. The rule itself takes two slokas (27-28): for an odd sign the lords are Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus, and "each of them in order rules 5, 5, 8, 7 and 5 degrees". For an even sign, the text says, the quantum, the planetary lordship and the deities are all reversed.

Three things about that wording shape everything on this page. First, the thirty one-degree parts are not handed out one at a time. They are grouped into five runs of unequal length, so in practice the division has five outcomes per sign, not thirty. Second, the rule names a ruling planet for each run and stops there. Every other varga rule in the chapter says which sign the count starts from; this one never mentions a starting sign. Third, the Sun and the Moon are absent from the list of lords. The only other varga in the chapter built on lords instead of a count through the signs is the Hora (Sloka 5-6), and it is the mirror case: the Hora uses only the Sun and the Moon, and the Trimshamsa uses only the other five.

Saravali states the same rule in a single line: "In odd Signs 5, 5, 8, 7 and 5 degrees are Trimsamsas of Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus, respectively, while the arrangement is reverse in even Signs" (Ch. 3, Sloka 15). The two texts agree on the lords, the spans and the reversal, so there is no disagreement to report on the rule itself. A translator note in Saravali Ch. 35 (Sloka 63) is worth knowing because the two are easy to confuse: the Panchamsa uses the same five lords in the same order but gives each an equal six degrees. That is a different division. This calculator does not compute it.

Read across a row and the reversal becomes visible as a mirror. A point at degree d of an odd sign has the same lord as a point at 30 minus d of an even sign: 3° of Aries and 27° of Taurus both belong to Mars, 8° of Gemini and 22° of Cancer both to Saturn. Jupiter sits in the middle of both tables, at 10° to 18° of an odd sign and 12° to 20° of an even one, so any point between 12° and 18° has Jupiter as its lord whichever sign it is in. That six-degree stretch is the only part of a sign where the odd or even question makes no difference to the lord.

The five presiding deities

The same two slokas attach a deity to each band: "The deities, ruling over the Trimshamsas, are, respectively, Agni, Vayu, Indra, Kuber and Varuna." In an odd sign, then, Agni goes with the Mars band, Vayu with Saturn, Indra with Jupiter, Kuber with Mercury and Varuna with Venus. Because the text reverses the deities along with the lords, each deity stays with the same planet in an even sign and only the order changes: Varuna first with Venus, then Kuber, Indra, Vayu and Agni.

What the texts read from this division

BPHS assigns each varga a subject in Ch. 7, Sloka 1-8: physique from the Lagna, wealth from the Hora, spouse from the Navamsa, and so on down the list until "evil effects from Trimshamsa". That phrase is the whole of the assignment. The chapter does not go on to say which lord means which difficulty, in which area of life, or when. The calculator page says the same thing in its own limits, and it is the reason the result is a table of lords and not a paragraph of predictions.

A few slokas later (13-16) BPHS adds two short instructions that are specific to this division. The first: "As for Trimshamsa effects, Surya is akin to Mangal and Chandra is akin to Shukr." Since neither luminary rules a band, the text pairs each with one of the five that do, the Sun with Mars and the Moon with Venus. The second: "The effects, applicable to Rashi, will apply to Trimshamsa." In other words, whatever is said of a planet placed in a sign of Mars in the birth chart is the template for a planet in a Trimshamsa of Mars. The text points back to the sign descriptions; it does not write a new set for D30.

Saravali adds two general statements. In its chapter on planetary strength it says that "a planet in own Trimsamsa gives happiness and good qualities" (Ch. 5, Sloka 31-33), in a list that says similar things of a planet in its own Hora, decanate, Navamsa, Saptamsa and Dwadasamsa. And in Ch. 9, Sloka 47 it reports an older opinion: "Sages say, that the nature of the native will correspond to the Trimsansa occupied by the Sun at birth." The first statement can be checked directly against the calculator result, as shown further down. The second is a pointer to which row to look at, not a rule the engine applies.

The modern casebook in this corpus, Advanced Predictive Astrology, lists D30 among its "bad periods from divisional charts": it says the dasha or sub-period of a planet debilitated in Trimsamsa goes with health disorders, alongside parallel lines for the Dashamsa and profession, the Navamsa and marriage, and the Saptamsa and children. That is the book's claim, reported as such. It is not medical advice, and this calculator does not time anything.

For the dates that claim would need, the place to look is the Vimshottari Dasha calculator, and for whether a planet is debilitated in its D30 sign, the D30 row of the Vimshopaka Bala calculator shows the dignity the engine found.

How the engine computes it, step by step

The page sends your birth date, time and resolved place to one handler, which builds the sidereal chart and passes it to a single function, computeTrimshamsaLords. Ten points go in: the Ascendant, the seven classical grahas, Rahu and Ketu. If there is no birth time or no resolved place, the handler refuses and no lords are shown, because the Ascendant cannot be found; the Lagna calculator explains why that point needs all three inputs. For each point the function then does four things.

1. 1.It finds the position of the point's Rasi sign in the list from Aries to Pisces and tests whether the sign is odd or even. Aries, the first sign, is odd; Taurus is even; and so on alternately.
2. 2.It picks the matching table of five bands, the odd-sign table or the even-sign one.
3. 3.It walks the bands in order and takes the first whose upper edge is greater than the point's degree within the sign. If none matches, which could only happen at a degree of exactly 30, it falls back to the last band.
4. 4.It returns three values from that band: the lord, a true or false flag for whether that lord is on the natural-benefic list, and the sign the band resolves to.

Nothing else enters the calculation. The sign a point is in matters only through being odd or even, so Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Aquarius are interchangeable as far as this function is concerned, and so are the six even signs. There is no house, no aspect, no reference to any other point. Each of the ten rows is computed independently of the other nine.

Where the sign comes from

The lords and the spans are taken from BPHS. The sign is a different kind of statement, and the engine's own notes are careful to say so. Each of the five lords owns two signs, one odd and one even: Mars owns Aries and Scorpio, Saturn owns Aquarius and Capricorn, Jupiter owns Sagittarius and Pisces, Mercury owns Gemini and Virgo, Venus owns Libra and Taurus. The engine gives a band in an odd sign the lord's odd sign and a band in an even sign the lord's even sign. Its notes describe this as the standard convention and write the sign out band by band instead of deriving it, so anyone can compare it against a reference table.

There is some support for that choice inside BPHS, though not in the Trimshamsa slokas themselves. When Ch. 7 (Sloka 9-12) explains how strength is graded across the divisions, it says that for a planet owning two signs a "distinction of placement in odd/even Rashi identical with own Rashi be made". The text expects the odd and even signs of one planet to be told apart in this context. It does not spell out the mapping for D30, which is why this page calls the sign a convention and the lord a quotation.

One consequence follows from the tables alone. Only ten signs can ever appear in the sign column. Cancer and Leo, the signs of the Moon and the Sun, are never produced, because neither luminary rules a band.

How much of the zodiac each lord holds

The bands of Jupiter, Mercury and Venus add up to 20 of every 30 degrees. So, before any chart is cast, a point has two chances in three of landing in a band whose lord is flagged benefic and one in three of landing with Mars or Saturn. This matters when you read a result. A chart in which six or seven of the ten points show a benefic lord is the expected outcome, not a sign of anything unusual.

The sample chart, point by point

The worked example on this page is a birth on 14 August 1994 at 06:42 in Ahmedabad. The calculator shows the ten results; the table below adds the Rasi positions they were computed from, taken from the same engine run, so each row can be checked by hand against the band table. The Rasi positions themselves are what the birth chart calculator returns for the same birth.

Several features of the rule show up in these ten rows. The Ascendant and the Sun both have Mars as lord, yet their signs differ, Aries and Scorpio. The Ascendant is in the first band of an odd sign and the Sun in the last band of an even one: same lord, opposite ends, and the odd or even split decides which of the two Mars signs is shown. Jupiter, Venus and Saturn all have Jupiter as lord, but Venus alone resolves to Pisces because Venus alone is in an even sign.

Rahu and Ketu share a row in all but name. The engine places Ketu exactly opposite Rahu, so the two always sit at the same degree, and the sign opposite an odd sign is always odd, the sign opposite an even one always even. Same degree and same sign type mean the same band. This is true of every chart, not only this one: the D30 results for Rahu and Ketu will always be identical, and the second row tells you nothing the first has not.

Two points are in a band of their own lord. Mars at 4.42° of Gemini is in the Mars band, and Jupiter at 13.55° of Libra is in the Jupiter band. This is the condition Saravali Ch. 5 describes as a planet in its own Trimsamsa, which that text counts in a planet's favour. You can spot it on any result by looking for a row where the point and the lord are the same graha. The Sun and the Moon can never qualify, since no band is theirs.

Finally, look at how close to an edge four of these points are. Mars is 0.51° short of the 5° line where Saturn takes over. The Moon is 0.36° short of 25°, where Venus begins. Venus is 0.99° past the 12° line it would need to be behind to fall in the Mercury band. Rahu and Ketu are 0.40° past 25°. Edges are not rare events: with five bands in thirty degrees, a point is never more than four degrees from one. The section on birth time below shows what this means for the Moon in this chart.

How to read each kind of result

The lord

The lord is the part of the result that BPHS states outright, and it is the part to rely on. It is one of five planets. By the instruction in Ch. 7, the way to read it is to borrow what the tradition says of that planet's signs: a Mars lord reads like a point placed in a sign of Mars, a Saturn lord like a point in a sign of Saturn. The nature of each of the five is set out in its own article: Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury and Venus. The engine itself attaches no interpretation to the lord. It reports which band the point is in.

The benefic flag

The flag is a lookup against a fixed list of four natural benefics the engine keeps for the whole Kundali: Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. The Moon never rules a band, so in practice the flag is true for Jupiter, Mercury and Venus bands and false for Mars and Saturn bands. It carries no information the lord column does not already carry. It is there so that a reader who does not know the classification can see it at a glance.

Two cautions. Mercury is on the list unconditionally. Classical texts often treat Mercury as taking on the nature of the planets it is with, and the engine does not model that here, so a Mercury band always reads as benefic. And the flag describes the lord, not the point. In the sample, Saturn has a benefic-flagged lord (Jupiter) and the Sun has a lord that is not flagged (Mars). Neither statement says that Saturn is doing well or the Sun badly in this chart.

The sign

The sign exists for one purpose: to give the strength calculation something to grade. A planet's dignity is a relationship between the planet and a sign, and a lord alone cannot supply that. It should not be read as a chart. No Ascendant sign is used to number houses, no point is said to be "in the 6th of D30", and the page draws no wheel. If you have seen a twelve-house Trimshamsa chart elsewhere, it was built by treating these signs as placements and counting houses from the D30 sign of the Ascendant. BPHS does not describe that step in the slokas that define this division, and this engine does not take it.

D30 inside the strength scores

The firmest use BPHS makes of this division is arithmetical. Ch. 7 defines the Vimshopaka score, a strength out of 20 spread across a set of divisional charts, and gives four schemes. Trimshamsa is a member of every one of them: it carries 1 point of 20 in the six-chart Shad Varg (Sloka 17-19), 1 in the seven-chart Sapt Varg, 1.5 in the ten-chart Dasha Varg (Sloka 20) and 1 in the full sixteen-chart Shodash Varg (Sloka 21-25). Of the sixteen divisions only the Rasi chart, the Hora, the Drekkana, the Navamsa, the Dwadasamsa and the Trimshamsa appear in all four lists. The same division turns up again in Ch. 27, where the positional strength called Sapt Vargaj Bal is summed over seven charts, the Trimshamsa among them.

This app implements the sixteen-chart scheme. In the Vimshopaka Bala calculator, D30 carries a weight of 1. For each of the seven classical grahas the engine takes the sign from this page, grades the graha's dignity in that sign, and awards a share of the weight: all of it for an exalted or Moolatrikona placement, three quarters for an own sign, five eighths for a friendly sign, half for a neutral one and nothing for an enemy sign or debilitation. Rahu and Ketu get no score because the engine keeps no dignity table for them. The D30 rows for the sample birth are below.

The table shows how small a part D30 plays. Jupiter earns the full point here and still has the lowest total of the seven, 6.00; Saturn earns nothing from D30 and still totals 8.00. One point in twenty cannot carry a planet. It also shows why the benefic flag and the dignity should not be confused. Saturn's lord is Jupiter, flagged benefic, yet Saturn in Jupiter's sign is graded as an enemy placement for this chart and scores zero. Friendship in this engine is the fivefold relation, which combines the natural tie between two planets with their distance from each other in the birth chart, so the same D30 sign can grade differently in another chart.

Because only ten signs are reachable, some dignities cannot occur in D30 at all. Jupiter is exalted in Cancer, which never appears, so Jupiter can never be exalted here. Mars is debilitated in Cancer, so Mars can never be debilitated here. The Sun and the Moon can never be in their own signs, though each can reach its exaltation sign (Aries for the Sun, through a Mars band in an odd sign; Taurus for the Moon, through a Venus band in an even sign) and its debilitation sign (Libra and Scorpio). Which of these applies to your chart is on the D30 line of each graha's breakdown in the Vimshopaka result.

Birth-time sensitivity, measured

With a thirty-fold name one might expect this to be among the most time-sensitive charts. It is not, because the thirty parts are grouped into five bands. The narrowest band is 5° wide, more than the 3° 20' slice of a Navamsa. To measure the effect, the sample birth was recomputed with the clock moved earlier and later, everything else unchanged.

Ten minutes either way changes nothing in this chart. Fifteen minutes later, the Ascendant crosses 5° of Leo and its lord becomes Saturn. Fifteen minutes earlier is the more instructive case: the Ascendant slips back into Cancer, and the lord is still Mars. The last band of an even sign and the first band of an odd sign both belong to Mars, so across this sign boundary the lord holds for a full ten degrees while only the sign changes, from Aries to Scorpio. The same thing happens with Venus at every boundary going from an odd sign into an even one. A sign change in the birth chart, which upsets almost every other reading, can leave the D30 lord of the Ascendant untouched.

Scanned minute by minute across the whole civil day of the sample birth, the Ascendant changed band 60 times, which is five bands in each of twelve signs. That averages one change every 24 minutes, though the real intervals vary with the band width and with how fast each sign rises at the latitude of birth. If your recorded time could be wrong by a quarter of an hour, treat the Ascendant row as provisional unless the Ascendant is well inside its band.

The planets are far steadier. In the same full-day scan the Moon, the fastest of them, changed band only twice: once at 07:19, when it passed 25° of Libra and its lord went from Mercury to Venus, and once in the afternoon when it entered Scorpio, where the first band of an even sign is again Venus. The sample birth is 37 minutes before that first crossing. So in this particular chart the Moon row depends on the birth time being right to within about half an hour, which is unusual; on most days the Moon spends many hours inside one band. The slower grahas would not change band on a wrong time of several hours. If you have no reliable time at all, the note on unknown birth times sets out what can still be computed, and the accuracy page describes how the app treats uncertain inputs.

One further input sits underneath all of this. The bands are cut from sidereal positions, and those depend on the ayanamsa, the offset between the tropical and sidereal zodiacs. A different ayanamsa shifts every point by the same small amount, which is enough to move a point that sits close to an edge, such as the Moon and Venus in the sample. The ayanamsa calculator shows the value used for any date.

Limits of this calculation

• It is a degree lookup, not a chart. There are no houses, aspects or conjunctions in D30 as computed here, and nothing in the result depends on any other point.
• The lord is from BPHS Ch. 6; the sign is a stated convention the engine needs for grading strength. They are not claims of the same weight.
• The deities named in the source are not used.
• No interpretation is generated. BPHS gives the subject of this division in four words and no rules for applying it, and the detailed classical rules that do exist are the ones this app declines to reproduce.
• Positions are rounded to hundredths of a degree before the band is chosen, so a point within a hundredth or two of an edge can fall either side.
• Rahu and Ketu receive a lord and a sign but no strength score from them.
• BPHS Ch. 6 (Sloka 42-53) says the divisions of a combust, defeated or weak graha are not to be counted as auspicious. The calculator does not apply that filter; it reports the band whatever the state of the graha.

Where D30 sits among the other charts

The nearest relative is the Hora (D2), the other division defined by lords and reversed between odd and even signs. Between them the two cover all seven classical planets: the Hora asks whether a point belongs to the Sun or the Moon, the Trimshamsa which of the remaining five it belongs to. The engine handles both the same way, returning a lord and that lord's sign and no house wheel.

Every other divisional chart on this site is a count through the signs and does produce a wheel with houses: the Navamsa (D9), which BPHS reads for the spouse and which carries three times the weight of D30 in the strength score; the Drekkana (D3) and Dwadasamsa (D12), which sit beside D30 in all four Vimshopaka schemes; and the neighbours in Parashara's list, the Saptavimshamsa (D27), read for strength and weakness, and the Khavedamsa (D40), read for auspicious and inauspicious effects. The Shashtiamsa (D60) is the finest of the sixteen and the heaviest in the score, at 4 points of 20.

For hardship as a subject, D30 is one line of evidence among several the tradition uses, and the Rasi chart comes first. The houses BPHS associates with enemies, illness and obstacles are covered in the articles on the 6th house and the 8th house, and a planet's overall condition is measured by the Shad Bala calculator. In the signed-in Kundali, the Trimshamsa appears as one of the divisional layers and shows the same lords and benefic flags this page computes. The full list of tools is on the calculators index.

More questions

Is Trimshamsa a chart with twelve houses?

Not as BPHS defines it and not as this page computes it. The defining slokas (Ch. 6, 27-28) give a ruling planet for each degree band and name no starting sign, unlike every count-based varga in the same chapter. The engine attaches a sign to each band for strength grading only and does not number houses from it.

Why are the bands unequal?

The source does not say. BPHS states the spans as 5, 5, 8, 7 and 5 degrees and Saravali Ch. 3 repeats them without a reason. What can be said is arithmetical: the five spans add to 30, and Jupiter and Mercury are given the wider bands, so together they hold half of every sign.

Does a Mars or Saturn lord mean something bad will happen?

No such conclusion follows from this result. One third of every sign belongs to Mars and Saturn, so most charts have several points there. BPHS names the subject of this division as evil effects but gives no rule that turns a single lord into an event, and the calculator makes no prediction.

Why do my Rahu and Ketu always have the same lord and sign?

Ketu is placed exactly opposite Rahu, so both are at the same degree of their signs, and opposite signs are always both odd or both even. Same degree and same sign type select the same band in the same table.

What does it mean when a planet is its own D30 lord?

The planet is in its own Trimshamsa. Saravali Ch. 5 lists this among the placements that favour a planet, saying it gives happiness and good qualities. In the strength score here it earns three quarters of the D30 point, or the full point for Mars in its Aries band, Jupiter in its Sagittarius band, Saturn in its Aquarius band and Mercury in its Virgo band.

How accurate does my birth time need to be?

For the nine grahas, usually not very: only the Moon moves fast enough to change band within a day, and it did so twice in the sample day. For the Ascendant, the band changed on average every 24 minutes in that scan, so a time good to about ten minutes is needed unless the Ascendant is well inside its band.

Does the app use D30 to judge character or marriage?

No. The classical chapters that do so apply only to women and attach moral verdicts to a degree band. Those verdicts are not reproduced or computed anywhere in this app.