Karakamsa Lagna: How to Find the Karakamsha Sign and Count From It

The karakamsa takes two steps to find. First pick out the atmakaraka, then look up which navamsha that graha falls in. Both steps are lookups, and this page sets out each one: the table that turns a degree into a navamsha sign, a worked chart, and a year of sky sampled to show where the karakamsha tends to land. That last part has a lopsided answer, because the atmakaraka is chosen for being late in its sign, and the late navamshas of every sign belong to the same four signs.

Karakamsa Meaning (कारकांश)

The word joins karaka, here short for atmakaraka, with amsha, a division; the division meant is the navamsha, the ninth part of a sign. So the karakamsha (also spelled karakamsa) is the navamsha sign of the atmakaraka. The term belongs to the Jaimini system, and the Jaimini Sutras’ own name for the same sign is swamsha, “one’s own amsha”. In that tradition the sign serves as a second lagna: houses are counted from it the way they are counted from the ascendant. The site’s older atmakaraka guide introduces the idea; what follows is the computation.

How to Calculate the Karakamsa

Step one is the atmakaraka. Take the degree each graha has covered inside its own sign and choose the largest; the chara karaka table covers the ranking in full, including the eight-graha variant that brings in Rahu. Step two: divide that graha’s degree by 3°20′, drop the fraction and add one to get its navamsha part, from 1 to 9. Step three: read the sign off the row for the graha’s rashi in the table below. That sign is the karakamsha.

An example, with positions made up for the arithmetic and belonging to no one: the Sun 8°05′ Libra, the Moon 19°40′ Aquarius, Mars 2°12′ Gemini, Mercury 21°30′ Scorpio, Jupiter 11°48′ Taurus, Venus 24°16′ Virgo and Saturn 28°03′ Leo. The highest degree belongs to Saturn, at 28°03′, so Saturn is the atmakaraka. That degree is in part 9, the 26°40′–30°00′ arc, and the Leo row gives Sagittarius for it. The karakamsha is Sagittarius. Had Saturn stood at 26°30′ instead, still the highest degree in the chart but one part earlier, the answer would have been Scorpio: a karakamsa calculator needs the degree, not the sign alone.

The Navamsha Lookup: Nine Parts of 3°20′ in Every Sign

The table follows the Parashari navamsha rule as the site’s varga library encodes it. A movable sign begins its nine parts from itself, a fixed sign from its 9th sign, and a dual sign from its 5th; after that each part steps on by one sign. Seen another way, the 108 navamshas of the zodiac run unbroken from Aries round the circle nine times, one for each nakshatra pada, and the library agrees with that cycle at all 108 of them. The highlighted cell is the part in which a sign meets its own name.

Look down the columns rather than across the rows. Every cell in the 1st, 4th and 7th columns is a movable sign; every cell in the 2nd, 5th and 8th is fixed; and the 3rd, 6th and 9th columns hold only dual signs. The last column in particular contains just four signs, Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces, each three times. That column matters more than the others for the karakamsha, for the reason below.

Why the Atmakaraka Sits Late in Its Sign

The atmakaraka is the maximum of seven degrees, and the maximum of seven numbers spread across 0° to 30° is seldom small. To put a figure on it, the site’s ephemeris was sampled every three hours through 2027, 2920 instants in all, using the same positions as the chara karaka page; at each instant the atmakaraka was found and its navamsha part noted. Each figure below is a share of those instants, which describes the sky in 2027 and is not a count of anybody’s chart.

In none of the 2920 instants did the atmakaraka stand in any of the first four parts; the lowest degree it held all year was 14°47′. From part 5 onward each part held it more often than the one before, and the last part, 26°40′–30°00′, held it in 76.6% of the instants. Combine that with the column pattern above and the karakamsha falls into a dual sign far more often than chance would give: in 80.0% of the instants it was one of Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius or Pisces, against the 33.3% that four signs out of twelve would get if every sign were equally likely.

Each Karakamsha Sign Across 2027

Pisces leads by a wide margin, at 46.2%. Three long stays account for 1153 of its 1348 instants: Saturn late in Pisces (554), Jupiter late in Cancer (320) and Mars late in Cancer (279). The Pisces row and the Cancer row both end on Pisces, so a graha lingering in the last part of either sign keeps the karakamsha there for long stretches. Cancer came last, at 0.5%; as a movable sign it appears only in the 1st, 4th and 7th columns of the table and never in the last, where the atmakaraka stood most often. In 32.8% of the instants the karakamsha was the very sign the atmakaraka occupied in the rashi chart, mostly because of Saturn’s long stay at the end of Pisces. A different year, with the slow grahas elsewhere, would rank the signs differently; the dual-sign lean is the part that carries over, since it comes from the table and the ranking rule.

The Karakamsa Chart: Houses Counted From the Karakamsha

A karakamsa lagna chart treats the karakamsha as house 1 and numbers the other eleven signs onward from it. One way of doing it, found in present-day Jaimini manuals, works in the navamsha chart and places each graha in its own navamsha sign; another counts from the same sign in the rashi chart. This page computes the first version and does not choose between them. For the example above, with Sagittarius as house 1:

The atmakaraka sits in house 1 of this chart by definition, since the karakamsha is its sign; here the Sun shares that house because its navamsha is Sagittarius too. The rest is the house count that the navamsa (D9) guide uses from the navamsha lagna, started from a different sign.

The 12th From the Karakamsha

One house in this chart has a rule of its own in the Jaimini tradition: the 12th sign from the karakamsha, and any graha in it, is where that tradition looks for the ishta devata, the chosen deity. The last column of the sign table gives that 12th sign for each karakamsha; in the example it is Scorpio. The step from that sign or graha to a named deity is where sources part company, and the lists in circulation do not agree with each other, so this page gives no list and names no deity.

How Much the Birth Time Matters

The karakamsha can change when the atmakaraka changes, and also when the same atmakaraka crosses into its next 3°20′ part. On 94 of the 365 days of 2027 the karakamsha at midnight was a different sign from the karakamsha at noon. When the birth time is uncertain, check how near the atmakaraka’s degree is to a part boundary, and how near the second-highest degree is to it, before relying on the result.

What This Page Does Not Do

It finds a sign and counts from it. It says nothing about what a karakamsha in any sign, or a graha in any house from it, shows about a person’s purpose, work, marriage or spiritual life, and it does not suggest a deity, a practice or a remedy. The 2027 shares describe one year’s sky at three-hour steps; they are not the odds of anyone being born with a given karakamsha. The tradition’s interpretations belong to a Jaimini astrologer working from the whole chart, not to a table. In Hindi: कारकांश लग्न: कारकांश राशि कैसे निकालें, उससे भाव कैसे गिनें.