Origin 600 to 800 CE
The Chaturthamsha (D-4), also called Turyamsha, divides each sign into four parts of seven and a half degrees, reckoned from the sign itself and the following kendra signs. It is the divisional chart of fortune, property, and fixed assets, examining home, land, real estate, immovable wealth, and general good fortune and happiness. It reveals the comforts and security one draws from residence and possessions. As one of the sixteen vargas, it refines what the D-1 promises regarding the fourth-house matters of dwelling and contentment.
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 the Sanskrit ordinal of its divisor: chaturthamsha, the fourth 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 Attributions
GovernsFortune, property, fixed assets 1 Learn More
D-4 Chaturthamsha, the Chart of Property
The Chaturthamsha chart, D-4, is the fourth divisional chart, formed by dividing each sign into four parts of seven and a half degrees. It signifies fortune, property, and fixed assets, land, home, and the material foundations of life, echoing the fourth house of the birth chart, which governs the same matters. It is sometimes called the Turyamsha. The chart is one of the sixteen divisional charts (shodashavarga) through which jyotisha examines a nativity, each magnifying one department of life. An astrologer consults the D-4 for questions of real estate, inheritance of property, and domestic security. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the divisional charts are a harmonic technique for drawing many focused readings from the same planetary longitudes of the birth moment.
The rule again follows a kendra construction, on the same angular logic as the trine rule governing the Drekkana: the first seven-and-a-half-degree part of a sign belongs to the sign itself, the second to the fourth sign from it, the third to the seventh, and the fourth to the tenth, so a planet in the earliest part of Aries stays in Aries in the D-4 while a planet in the last part of Aries appears instead in Capricorn. Because the four resulting signs, first, fourth, seventh and tenth, are always the four kendras, angular houses, from whichever sign is being divided, the Chaturthamsha shares its underlying geometry with the four cardinal points of the birth chart itself, which is part of the traditional rationale for reading it as concerned with foundation and fixed possession.
D-4 in Practice: The Angles of a Sign
One division of the Chaturthamsha spans 7 degrees 30 minutes, four to a sign and forty eight in the zodiac. The ascendant crosses that arc in roughly half an hour, so the D-4 remains readable from a birth time known only to the nearest ten or fifteen minutes.
The four divisions of a sign are assigned to that sign and to the fourth, seventh and tenth from it, the four angles counted from the sign itself. The construction mirrors in miniature what the chart is for: the angles of a horoscope are the fixed points of a life, and the D-4 is read for the fixed things a person holds, land, buildings, the home and property in general.
Where the D-4 sits in the scheme matters to how much weight a reading should give it. It is not one of the shadvarga, not one of the saptavarga and not one of the dashavarga. It enters only in the full shodashavarga of sixteen, alongside the D-20, D-24, D-27, D-40 and D-45. That places it among the specialised charts, consulted when the question is specifically about property rather than folded into a general estimate of a planet's strength.
The practical consequence is that a D-4 reading should be offered as an answer to a narrow question, not as a second opinion on the nativity as a whole.
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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