Origin 600 to 800 CE
The Akshavedamsha (D-45) divides each sign into forty-five parts. It is the divisional chart of character and conduct and of the paternal legacy, examining overall morality, behavior, and the influences inherited through the father line. It reveals the ethical fiber and disposition of the native and the patrilineal karmic inheritance. Among the sixteen vargas it is read alongside the D-40 for the two ancestral lines, and it is regarded as a subtle indicator of the moral quality of the person.
Facts
Origins
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 finer divisional chart is 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, later than the handful of vargas Varahamihira's earlier Brihat Jataka already names. 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra Origin of the NameThe name is formed the same way as the Khavedamsha, on the bhutasankhya word-numeral system, and gives forty-five. 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 Attributions
GovernsCharacter, conduct, paternal legacy 1 Learn More
D-45 Akshavedamsha, the Chart of Character and Paternal Legacy
The Akshavedamsha chart, D-45, is the fifteenth of the sixteen divisional charts, formed by dividing each sign into forty-five parts. It signifies character and conduct and, in particular, the legacy inherited through the paternal line, the moral disposition and the fortunes passed down from the father's side. An astrologer consults the D-45 for questions of temperament, ethical nature, and patrilineal inheritance. The chart is one of the shodashavarga, the fine harmonic subdivisions through which jyotisha magnifies each department of a single nativity, and among the most detailed. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the divisional charts are a mathematical technique for drawing many focused readings from the one set of planetary longitudes recorded at the moment of birth.
Alongside the finer vargas generally, the exact division rule for the Akshavedamsha's forty-five parts is less uniformly given across classical and modern sources than the rules for the six major vargas, and its place in a working consultation is correspondingly narrower, typically brought in only when a client's question turns specifically on inherited character or on the paternal line, rather than consulted as a matter of course the way the Rashi and Navamsha are for virtually every reading.
D-45 in Practice: Two and Two Thirds Minutes
One division of the Akshavedamsha spans 40 minutes of arc, two thirds of a degree, forty five to a sign and 540 in the zodiac. The ascendant crosses that arc in about two minutes and forty seconds.
Only the D-60 is finer. At this scale the ascendant is a function of the seconds of the birth time, and no ordinary record carries seconds, so the honest position is that the D-45 ascendant is unavailable for almost every chart an astrologer will ever be handed. Saying so is more useful than producing one.
The planetary placements hold up better, as they do in every high varga. The Moon crosses 40 minutes of arc in about an hour and thirteen minutes, the Sun in about sixteen hours, and the rest of the grahas move too slowly for a day of uncertainty to matter.
The Akshavedamsha belongs only to the shodashavarga. Its subject is character and conduct, and the tradition associates it with the paternal line, making it the counterpart of the D-40 and its maternal one.
There is a further consequence of the fineness. A varga this narrow amplifies any error in the underlying longitudes as well as in the time, so a chart cast against a different ayanamsha will differ throughout the D-45 even where the D-1 is identical.
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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