Origin 500 to 600 CE
The Dwadashamsha (D-12), also called Suryamsha, divides each sign into twelve parts of two and a half degrees, reckoned from the sign itself. It is the divisional chart of parents and ancestry, examining the mother and father, lineage, and the inherited physical and karmic patterns passed down the family line. It is consulted to judge the well-being of the parents and the influences a person carries from their forebears. As one of the sixteen vargas, it refines the birth chart indications concerning heredity and the parental legacy.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period500 to 600 CE 1Tradition: Brihat Jataka (Varahamihira) Origin Period600 to 800 CE 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra One of the shodashavarga, the sixteen divisional charts set out in the extant Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra. Nine of the sixteen appear only in this later layer; the graded schemes of six, seven, ten and sixteen divisions are the text's own, and the sixteen-fold set is not attested in the earlier literature. Origin PeriodThis divisional chart appears in Varahamihira's Brihat Jataka; Pingree's survey of jyotihsastra literature situates that text within the sixth century CE of classical Sanskrit horoscopy. 1Tradition: Brihat Jataka (Varahamihira) Origin PeriodThis divisional chart is also set out in the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, which Pingree's survey situates within the sixth to eighth century CE stratum of classical Sanskrit horoscopy, alongside its earlier attestation in Varahamihira's Brihat Jataka. 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra Origin of the NameThe name is the Sanskrit ordinal of its divisor: dwadashamsha, the twelfth part. 1 Attributed Author / CompilerParashara, to whom the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra ascribes itself. The ascription is pseudepigraphic: Parashara is a sage of the epic and puranic literature, the extant text is a compilation of roughly the seventh to eighth century with later interpolation, and its surviving manuscripts are of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The system is "Parashari" by convention, not by authorship. 1 Identity
Also Known As Learn More
D-12 Dwadashamsha, the Chart of Parents
The Dwadashamsha chart, D-12, is the eighth of the sixteen divisional charts, formed by dividing each sign into twelve parts of two and a half degrees. It signifies parents and ancestry, the conditions of the father and mother, and what is inherited from the lineage. It is sometimes called the Suryamsha. An astrologer consults the D-12 for questions concerning the parents' health and fortunes and the ancestral inheritance, physical and karmic. The chart is one of the shodashavarga, the harmonic subdivisions through which jyotisha magnifies each department of a nativity. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the divisional charts are a method for extracting focused readings from the single set of planetary longitudes recorded at the birth moment.
Unlike the parity-based Saptamsha and Dashamsha or the modality-based Navamsha, the Dwadashamsha uses the plainest possible rule: its twelve two-and-a-half-degree divisions are always counted forward from the sign itself, regardless of whether that sign is odd or even, movable, fixed or dual, so the first part of any sign stays in that sign and the twelfth part falls in the sign immediately before it, completing a full circuit of the zodiac. Because the rule never varies with the type of sign involved, the D-12 is one of the more straightforward of the sixteen to calculate by hand, and its consistency is sometimes cited as a reason ancestry and inheritance, matters understood as fixed by birth rather than shaped by circumstance, are assigned to it.
D-12 in Practice: The Zodiac Repeated Inside a Sign
One division of the Dwadashamsha spans 2 degrees 30 minutes, twelve to a sign and 144 in the zodiac. The ascendant crosses that arc in about ten minutes.
Of the sixteen vargas this one has the simplest construction. The twelve divisions of a sign are assigned to the twelve signs in order beginning from the sign itself, so the whole zodiac is reproduced inside every sign at one twelfth scale. A planet in the first 2 degrees 30 minutes of Taurus is in the Taurus dwadashamsha, in the next in Gemini, and so on around the circle back to Aries.
That self-similarity is why the D-12 was among the six charts of the shadvarga from the beginning, and it carries through the saptavarga, dashavarga and shodashavarga as well. It is one of only six divisions present in all four classical groupings.
Its subject is the parents and, through them, ancestry. The tradition reads the fourth house from the D-12 ascendant for the mother and the ninth for the father, following the same house significations used in the birth chart, which is consistent with the chart being a scaled copy rather than a rearrangement.
A ten minute tolerance is tight enough that the D-12 rewards a birth time taken from a hospital record and punishes one recalled decades later.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Originates in Language
The term is Sanskrit, and the technical vocabulary of the Panchanga and of jyotisha more widely is Sanskrit throughout, whatever the vernacular in which a given almanac is printed. The name is a Sanskrit term. Regional almanacs render it in the local script and pronunciation, so a reader will meet the same term in several transliterations without any difference of reference.
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