D3 Drekkana Chart: The Three Decanates of Every Sign

D3 Chart Name: Drekkana

The D3 chart is also known as the drekkana chart (द्रेष्काण, sometimes written drekkan or dreshkana), the third of the sixteen divisional charts in the Parashari scheme. In English it is also called the decanate chart, since each of its parts is a decan, a third of a sign. A 30° sign has three of them, 10° each, so the zodiac holds 36 drekkanas in all.

Each Sign’s Drekkanas Stay Inside Its Element

The Parashari rule gives the first drekkana of a sign to the sign itself, the second to the 5th sign from it and the third to the 9th. Those three signs, a sign and its two trines, always share an element. Aries, a fire sign, divides into Aries, Leo and Sagittarius, the three fire signs; Taurus divides into the three earth signs; and the same holds for all twelve. A drekkana never carries a graha out of the element of its rashi sign.

The reason sits in the counting. Moving to the 5th sign is a jump of four signs, and four goes into twelve exactly three times. Starting anywhere, three jumps of four bring the count back to where it began, so the three parts of a sign use up its trine, and a fourth jump would land back on the sign itself.

All 36 Drekkanas and Their Lords

The table lists every sign’s three parts, with the lord of each drekkana sign in brackets. Signs run in zodiac order, Aries to Pisces.

Each column contains all twelve signs once, so every sign is a first drekkana once, a second drekkana once and a third drekkana once. Inside any one row the three lords are always three different grahas.

Two Families of Lords

Collect the lords by element and the seven grahas split into two groups that never mix. The earth signs and the air signs draw on the same three, Venus, Mercury and Saturn; only the order differs from sign to sign. The fire signs use Mars, the Sun and Jupiter, and the water signs use the Moon, Mars and Jupiter: Mars and Jupiter are common to both, and the third lord is the Sun on the fire side and the Moon on the water side.

Counted across the whole zodiac, the 36 drekkanas give the Sun and the Moon three each, because each rules a single sign and every sign is a drekkana three times. The other five grahas, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury and Saturn, rule two signs apiece and so own six drekkanas each. Rahu and Ketu are not sign lords in the rulership table used here and so own no drekkana; they still occupy one, read off their degree like any graha.

The First Ten Degrees Repeat the Rashi Sign

Because the first part is the sign itself, a graha or lagna in the opening 10° of any sign has the same sign in the D-1 and the D-3. In the second and third parts it never does. This is the drekkana’s counterpart of the agreement that the navamsa calls vargottama, and it covers 120° of the zodiac, three times the 40° taken up by the navamsa’s twelve vargottama arcs of 3°20′, which are mapped on the vargottama planet page. The navamsa itself, and why its first part follows a different rule for movable, fixed and dual signs, is on the D9 navamsa chart page.

Placing a Graha in the D3

Take the graha’s degree inside its sign, see which third it falls in, and read the row:

• 14°30′ Cancer is in the 2nd drekkana (10°–20°), so its D-3 sign is Scorpio, the 5th from Cancer, ruled by Mars.
• 25°00′ Gemini is in the 3rd drekkana (20°–30°), so its D-3 sign is Aquarius, the 9th from Gemini, ruled by Saturn.
• 8°00′ Capricorn is in the 1st drekkana (0°–10°), so its D-3 sign is Capricorn, the sign itself, ruled by Saturn.

The element rule gives a check on any D3 chart. A graha’s D-3 sign is always the 1st, 5th or 9th sign from its rashi sign, and two grahas sharing a rashi sign end up either together or in trine to each other in the drekkana. A D3 that puts a graha in any other position, the 4th or the 7th from its rashi sign for instance, is not the Parashari drekkana, whether by error or because it follows another scheme. The lagna is placed the same way from its degree, which a free kundli prints; a lagna near 10° or 20° needs an accurate birth time to settle which third it is in, and the page gives no clock time for it.

What the Parashari List Assigns to the D-3

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, listing what each of the sixteen charts is consulted for, gives the drekkana to siblings (the co-born). The page reports that assignment and goes no further. It does not say how many brothers or sisters a chart shows, whether they are older or younger, their sex, their health or how the native gets on with them, and it gives no reading of any graha in any drekkana.

The tables on this page are the Parashari drekkana only. Other drekkana schemes exist, including the Jagannatha and the Somanatha drekkanas, and they assign signs by rules of their own that this page does not set out. The full set of sixteen charts and how each one divides a sign is on the divisional charts (shodashvarga) hub; the chart before this one in the list, the D2 hora, has only two signs in play where the drekkana has all twelve. In Hindi: द्रेष्काण कुंडली (D3): हर राशि के तीन द्रेष्काण और स्वामी.