Origin 600 to 800 CE
The Chaturvimshamsha (D-24), also called Siddhamsha, divides each sign into twenty-four parts. It is the divisional chart of education and learning, examining academic success, knowledge, scholarship, and skill acquired through study. It reveals the strength and direction of the intellect in formal learning, the subjects and achievements of the mind, and the capacity for mastery of a discipline. It is closely consulted for students and scholars, and it forms part of the Shodashavarga scheme of sixteen divisions.
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: chaturvimshamsha, the twenty-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 Learn More
D-24 Chaturvimshamsha, the Chart of Learning
The Chaturvimshamsha chart, D-24, is the eleventh of the sixteen divisional charts, formed by dividing each sign into twenty-four parts. It signifies education and learning, formal study, the acquisition of knowledge and skill, and success in academic and scholarly pursuits. It is also called the Siddhamsha. An astrologer consults the D-24 for questions of intellectual aptitude, the course of a person's schooling, and attainment in learning. The chart is one of the shodashavarga, the 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 technique for drawing many focused readings from the one set of planetary positions recorded at the moment of birth.
Its alternate name, Siddhamsha, meaning the accomplished or perfected division, points to the chart's traditional use in judging not merely whether formal education is undertaken but whether real mastery, siddhi, is achieved in whatever is studied, a distinction some commentators draw between the Chaturvimshamsha and a simple reading of the fifth house of the Rashi chart, which covers learning and intelligence more broadly without singling out attainment as sharply. Like the other vargas finer than the Dwadashamsha, the exact classical rule for locating its twenty-four divisions is less uniformly transmitted than for the D-9 or D-10, and different manuals present variant starting conventions.
D-24 in Practice: Five Minutes to a Division
One division of the Chaturvimshamsha spans 1 degree 15 minutes, twenty four to a sign and 288 in the zodiac. The ascendant crosses that arc in about five minutes.
At this scale the arithmetic of the chart has outrun the accuracy of almost every birth record. Five minutes is roughly the granularity at which times are rounded when written by hand, so a D-24 ascendant taken from a certificate that reads a quarter past nine is one candidate among several and should be described that way.
The planets are a different matter and remain readable. The Moon crosses 1 degree 15 minutes in about two and a quarter hours; the Sun takes about a day and a quarter; everything slower is effectively fixed for the whole day. A D-24 reading built on planetary placements alone is therefore robust where the same reading built on its houses is not.
The Chaturvimshamsha belongs only to the shodashavarga of sixteen. Its subject is learning, formal education and the acquisition of knowledge, which the tradition separates from the intelligence a planet signifies in the birth chart. The distinction is between what a person can grasp and what they were actually taught, and the D-24 addresses the second.
One further point belongs to the D-24 in particular. Because a division here is 1 degree 15 minutes and the nakshatra pada is 3 degrees 20 minutes, the two schemes cut the zodiac at almost entirely different places, so a planet can sit comfortably inside its pada and yet within seconds of arc of a chaturvimshamsha boundary. An astrologer who has satisfied themselves that a nakshatra placement is secure has established nothing at all about this chart, and the check has to be made again at this scale.
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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