Drekkana Chart Calculator (D3)

The third house is the house of the arms and hands, of what a person does with their own strength before anyone helps. The Drekkana takes that theme and gives it a chart. It is read for younger siblings, for physical and moral courage, for stamina in the face of a fight one has picked oneself, and for the capacity to start rather than to be given.

Because the three parts of a sign fall in its own trine, the D3 cannot move a fire planet to water. A planet in Aries lands in Aries, Leo or Sagittarius; a planet in Cancer lands in Cancer, Scorpio or Pisces. That property makes the D3 unusually conservative among the vargas: it refines temperament rather than reversing it, and a D3 reading that contradicts the birth chart outright is usually a computation error rather than a finding.

Mars is the natural significator of the third house and of courage, so its Drekkana placement carries more weight here than in any other varga except the D1. The Moon in the D3 is read for nerve rather than for feeling — whether a person's resolve holds under pressure — and the 3rd lord of the birth chart, located in the D3, is the single most specific line the chart gives about siblings.

Each sign is cut into three Drekkanas of 10 degrees. The first ten degrees stay in the sign itself; the second ten count to the 5th sign from it; the third ten to the 9th. The three parts of a sign therefore land on the three signs of its own element — the trine — which is why the D3 preserves elemental temperament where most vargas scatter it.

That rule is the whole difference between a divisional chart and a decorative second drawing of the birth chart. The start sign — which sign the parts are counted from — is fixed per varga by classical text and is not the cyclic multiplication most calculators use. The two agree only for divisors 16, 20 and 27.

The Drekkana is among the oldest divisions in the literature. Parashara gives it in the sixth chapter of the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra with the trine rule above, and assigns it to sahaja — the third house, siblings and one's own effort. It also appears in the Brihat Jataka, where Varahamihira devotes a whole chapter to the thirty-six Drekkana images.

Those images are worth naming precisely so that they are not confused with what this page computes. The Drekkana image tradition assigns a pictorial description to each of the thirty-six divisions and is used in Prashna and in some medical readings. This calculator produces the Drekkana *rashi* chart, which is the placement of each planet in the D3, and does not print the images. The engine computes the division; it does not hold the image catalogue, so the page does not claim to.

1. Find the D3 ascendant and its element The Drekkana lagna is in the same element as the birth lagna, always, by construction. Which of the three it is says which face of that element is being expressed: the cardinal, the fixed or the mutable one. That is the first sentence of the reading and it is the one most tools skip.
2. Locate Mars Mars is the karaka of the third house. Its Drekkana sign and house describe where a person's initiative goes and how it behaves when it meets resistance. Mars in a kendra of the D3 reads as effort that lands; in the 6th, 8th or 12th, as effort spent on friction, delay or things that stay private.
3. Read the 3rd house of the D3 and its lord The third house of the Drekkana is the third house of the third house, and this is where siblings are read most specifically. Occupants, the sign, and the whereabouts of its lord together describe the relationship far better than the count of planets in the D1's third house.
4. Check the 11th for elder siblings and the 3rd for younger The classical convention counts younger siblings from the 3rd and elder ones from the 11th. Reading both in the D3 rather than only the 3rd is what separates a reading of siblings from a reading of courage, since the two share the chart.
5. Cross-read with the D1 rather than replacing it The D3 refines; it does not overturn. A weak third house in the birth chart with a strong D3 reads as capacity that has to be deliberately raised rather than capacity that is absent. The reverse — a strong D1 third house and a scattered D3 — reads as courage that is available but not consistently applied.

A planet occupying the same sign in the birth chart and in the D3 is vargottama in this division — literally 'best in division'. The reading is stability rather than strength: the planet is doing the same thing at two resolutions of one chart, so whatever it signifies is consistent rather than conditional. The result table above marks them.

Two cautions. A consistently difficult placement is also vargottama, and the reading is then that the difficulty is stable. And in the D12 and the D60 the division counts from the sign itself, so a planet at the very start of a sign is vargottama by construction rather than by merit — a property of the rule and not a dignity. The vargottama calculator checks every planet against every division at once.

A wrong divisional chart does not look wrong. It renders cleanly, it is internally consistent, and nothing warns you — which is why the same three mistakes have propagated across the internet for twenty years. All three come from computing a varga with arithmetic instead of with its classical rule.

The cyclic shortcut. Multiplying the sign index by the divisor and taking the result modulo twelve is a tempting one-liner and it agrees with Parashara only for divisors 16, 20 and 27. For 12 and 60 it always yields a multiple of twelve — Aries — so it discards the planet's own sign and puts an entire chart in one sign. A D12 or D60 in which every planet shares a sign is this bug, and it is common enough that most readers have seen one without recognising it.

The missing odd-even reversal. The D7 counts from the 7th sign in an even sign and the D10 from the 9th. A generic divisor ignores both, which displaces every even-sign planet by six signs in a D7 and eight in a D10 — roughly half the chart, moved half the zodiac, with no symptom at all.

Treating the D30 as an equal division. The Trimsamsa has five unequal bands per sign, reversed in even signs. Dividing by thirty instead produces a chart that is wrong at every degree of every sign, and one that shows planets in Cancer or Leo — signs a real Trimsamsa cannot contain.

The check for this varga: every planet stays in its own element — a planet in Aries lands in Aries, Leo or Sagittarius and nowhere else. If a D3 you have been given anywhere fails that test, the start-sign rule was not applied and every placement in it is suspect.

The start-sign rules this site uses are stated in the engine and pinned by a test against a hand-derived chart, with a published citation for each of the sixteen. That is not a claim of infallibility; it is a claim that the rules are written down where they can be checked, which is the only kind of claim a calculator can honestly make.

A Drekkana division is 10 degrees wide. The ascendant moves through roughly one degree every four minutes of clock time, so the D3 ascendant holds for about 40 minutes before it changes sign. That figure is an average: the rate varies with latitude and with which sign is rising, and near the poles it varies a great deal.

Planets are far steadier than the ascendant, which is why a rounded birth time damages a divisional chart unevenly rather than uniformly. The Moon is the fastest of them and changes Drekkana about every 18.2 hours; the Sun takes around a month per sign in the birth chart and correspondingly longer per division; Jupiter and Saturn are effectively fixed across a whole day. So if your recorded time is uncertain, distrust the ascendant first and the Moon second, and read the slow planets with confidence.

This page assumes a rectified birth time — a time established or confirmed against events, rather than one recalled to the nearest quarter hour. Every divisional chart beyond the D9 is highly sensitive to birth time, and the finer ones are not merely less reliable on a rounded time but arbitrary: at half a degree per division the D60 ascendant changes about every two minutes, so a time rounded to five minutes leaves two or three equally likely charts and no way to choose between them. If you do not have a time you trust, the honest thing is to read the birth chart and the Navamsa and stop there.

The ascendant is not a property of the instant alone. It is the point of the ecliptic rising over a particular horizon, so it is a function of the moment and of the coordinate together, and the two trade off exactly: the sky turns one degree every four minutes, and one degree of longitude is four minutes of local time. Moving 10 degrees of longitude — about 1032 km east or west at Indian latitudes — moves the ascendant by one whole Drekkana part, which is to say it hands you a different D3 ascendant and rotates every house in the chart above.

Latitude matters separately and less obviously. It does not shift the clock, it changes how fast each sign climbs — the ascensional difference — so two places on the same meridian and the same instant still rise different degrees, and the gap grows the further from the equator you are. This is why a chart cast for a state capital is not a rounding of a chart cast for a village two districts away; it is a different chart that happens to look plausible.

So enter the town you were actually born in. The place search above accepts any village, town or city a geocoder knows, not a shortlist of metros, and it prints the latitude, longitude and timezone it used above the result so you can check them against a map. Since a D3 division is the unit this page is built from, a birth place picked for convenience damages the result in the same way and by the same mechanism as a birth time rounded to the nearest quarter hour.

The Drekkana does not count siblings. No divisional chart does. The old texts that appear to give a number are read as describing a tendency in a family pattern, and family size in any real population is decided by circumstances no chart contains.

A difficult third house or a scattered D3 is not a statement about anyone's relationship with a brother or sister. It describes a chart factor. Real siblings are people, and nothing in this division licenses a conclusion about how one of them will behave.

Courage in this chart means the classical sahaja quality — initiative, nerve, the willingness to begin. It is not a measure of a person's character, and a modest D3 is not a moral finding.

Two limits apply to every page in this family and are worth stating in one place. Divisional charts beyond the D9 are highly birth-time sensitive, and every reading here assumes a rectified birth time. And nothing on this site is medical, legal or financial advice: a chart is a traditional interpretive framework, not a diagnosis, not a forecast, and never a reason to delay professional help.

Parashara's sixteen divisions are a single instrument, not sixteen instruments. The birth chart is cut at sixteen different resolutions — halves, thirds, quarters, sevenths, ninths, tenths, twelfths, sixteenths, twentieths, twenty-fourths, twenty-sevenths, thirtieths, fortieths, forty-fifths and sixtieths — and a planet's condition is judged from how it behaves across them rather than from any one. The D3 is one of those sixteen and is read in that company.

The weighting is called Vimshopaka Bala, twenty-point strength, and it is where the tradition states which divisions carry most. D1, D9 and D60 take the largest shares; the D2, D3, D7, D10 and D12 sit in the middle; the D16, D20, D24, D27, D40 and D45 carry least. That ordering is worth respecting. A reading built on a minor varga against the evidence of the major ones is almost always reading a birth-time error.

Two of the sixteen are not equal divisions and must never be computed with a generic divisor. The D30 Trimsamsa has five unequal bands per sign, reversed in even signs. The D60 Shashtiamsa is an equal division for the rashi but its sixty deities are enumerated forwards in odd signs and backwards in even ones. Beyond those, the start-sign rule differs per varga and only coincides with the cyclic shortcut for divisors 16, 20 and 27 — for 12 and 60 the shortcut collapses the whole chart into Aries. Every chart on this site uses the classical rules, which are pinned by a test against a hand-derived chart.

D8 Ashtamsa and D11 Rudramsa are deliberately absent from this engine and from this site. They are not part of Parashara's sixteen, and the published rules for them disagree with each other, so there is no single chart to compute. Publishing one would mean choosing a rule and not saying so.