Origin 500 to 600 CE
The Saptamsha (D-7) divides each sign into seven parts, counted from the sign itself in odd signs and from the seventh sign in even signs. It is the divisional chart of children and progeny, examining offspring, procreation, and the continuation of the lineage, and it is also read for grandchildren and creative fruitfulness. Planets and lords connected with the fifth house are studied here to judge the prospect, number, and welfare of children. It forms part of the Shodashavarga scheme and refines the promise of progeny shown in the birth chart.
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: saptamsha, the seventh 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-7 Saptamsha, the Chart of Children
The Saptamsha chart, D-7, is the fifth of the sixteen divisional charts, formed by dividing each sign into seven parts. It signifies children and progeny, the capacity to have offspring, their well-being, and the wider theme of creative continuation and legacy. It echoes the fifth house of the birth chart, which governs children and creativity. An astrologer consults the D-7 for questions of fertility, the number and fortunes of children, and the continuation of the line. The chart is one of the shodashavarga, the set of harmonic subdivisions through which jyotisha magnifies each department of a single nativity. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the divisional charts are a mathematical method for extracting focused readings from the one set of planetary positions recorded at the birth moment.
The rule alternates by the odd or even parity of the sign being divided: in the six odd signs the seven Saptamsha divisions are counted starting from the sign itself, while in the six even signs the count instead begins from the seventh sign onward. Because the pattern flips at every sign rather than running in one direction across the whole zodiac, two planets a single sign apart, one in an odd sign and one in the even sign following it, can land in quite different, unrelated parts of the D-7 even though their birth positions were close together, a sensitivity to the odd or even parity of the base sign that several of the finer vargas share with the Saptamsha.
D-7 in Practice: The Division That Does Not Come Out Even
One division of the Saptamsha spans 30 degrees divided by seven, which is 4 degrees 17 minutes and about 9 seconds of arc, eighty four divisions in the zodiac. The ascendant crosses that arc in roughly seventeen minutes.
Seven is the first divisor in the scheme that does not go evenly into thirty, and the consequence is practical rather than theoretical. Every saptamsha boundary after the first falls on a fraction of a minute of arc, so two programs that round the division width differently, or that carry a different number of decimal places in the planetary longitude, can place a planet sitting near a boundary in different divisions. When a D-7 reading turns on a planet within a few minutes of arc of a cusp, the honest report is that the placement is uncertain rather than that it is one thing or the other.
The counting rule is settled: in an odd sign the seven divisions are counted from that sign onward, and in an even sign from the seventh sign from it.
The Saptamsha is the chart that turns the shadvarga of six into the saptavarga of seven, and it carries through into the dashavarga and the shodashavarga as well, so it is one of the more heavily weighted divisions despite its awkward arithmetic. Its subject is children and the prospect of them.
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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