D3 Drekkana chart: siblings, courage and initiative in Vedic astrology

What is the D3 Drekkana chart?

The D3, called the Drekkana (the decan), is one of the sixteen divisional charts Parashara describes in the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, the great treatise of Jyotish. Like every divisional chart, it redistributes your planets into a new wheel, with its own Ascendant and twelve houses, devoted to a single area of life.

That area extends house 3 of the D1: siblings, courage, initiative. Indian tradition calls this house sahaja bhava (the house of those born with you) and parakrama bhava (the house of valor). The D3 shows how you gather momentum, what you dare to take on by yourself, and the quality of your bonds with those who grew up beside you.

How the D3 is calculated: the sign, its 5th and its 9th

Parashara’s rule cuts each sign into three parts of 10°. From 0° to 10°, the planet stays in the sign itself; from 10° to 20°, it moves to the 5th sign counted from it; from 20° to 30°, to the 9th. The three decans of a sign therefore belong to the same element: they form a trine of fire, earth, air or water.

The degree is multiplied by three, modulo 30: a Mars at 25° Gemini falls in the third decan, Aquarius, at 15°. The positions are sidereal, calculated with the Lahiri ayanamsa. Here are the first four signs, with the rulers of their decans:

• Aries: Aries, Leo, Sagittarius (Mars, the Sun, Jupiter).
• Taurus: Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn (Venus, Mercury, Saturn).
• Gemini: Gemini, Libra, Aquarius (Mercury, Venus, Saturn).
• Cancer: Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces (the Moon, Mars, Jupiter).

The other eight signs follow the same logic: the sign, then the 5th and the 9th, counting the sign itself as the first. Virgo thus gives Virgo, Capricorn, Taurus.

What do you look at in the D3 chart?

The D3 is read first through its Ascendant and its house 3, then through the planets that carry the subject. Each one answers a precise question about your drive and your sibling bonds.

• The D3 Ascendant and its ruler: your natural way of taking the initiative.
• House 3 of the D3 and its ruler: younger siblings, personal effort, what you undertake with your hands and your voice.
• House 11 of the D3: older siblings, and the allies who clear the road for you.
• Mars, the karaka (significator) of courage and siblings: its sign and house in the D3 show the temper of your drive.
• Jaimini’s Bhratrikaraka, the planet that stands for siblings and guides: see the Jaimini karakas.

Always cross-check with the D1: house 3 and its ruler, house 11, Mars. A promise of the D1 that the D3 confirms is solid; a promise the D3 qualifies shows where to put the effort.

A sample D3 reading

Take that Mars at 25° Gemini again. In the D1, it sits in a sign of Mercury: a courage of speech, argument and quick wit. In the D3, it moves to Aquarius, a sign of Saturn: this courage looks for a shared cause, holds over time and serves a group, an idea, a friendship.

Suppose this D3 has a Leo Ascendant: Mars in Aquarius then occupies house 7. The drive wakes up when facing another person, in partnership, negotiation, a fair contest. With siblings, the bond feels like equality and friendship, sometimes with a chosen distance. The lever: Saturn slows things down to make them last, and this person goes furthest by giving their bursts of energy some consistency.

If, in the same D3, house 3, Libra, holds Venus, its own ruler, initiative also flows through art, diplomacy and taste: a courage that persuades rather than forces, and sibling bonds where people know how to make up.

Vedic drekkana and Western decans: what is the difference?

The drekkana is a close cousin of the decans of Western astrology: both cut each sign into three slices of 10°, making thirty-six decans for the whole zodiac. Better still, the triplicity method, the one used on the site’s decans page, gives the same signs as Parashara: the second decan of Aries is colored by Leo, the third by Sagittarius. Western astrology also knows another order, called Chaldean, which does not follow the elements.

The differences come down to three points, and they explain why the same chart does not always give the same decan on both sides.

• The zodiac. Western decans are calculated in the tropical zodiac, the drekkana in the sidereal zodiac, about 24° apart today. A planet at 5° Taurus tropical sits around 11° Aries sidereal: first decan of Taurus on one side, Leo drekkana on the other. The details are in tropical vs sidereal.
• The rulers. The drekkana only knows the seven visible planets: Scorpio goes back to Mars, Aquarius to Saturn, Pisces to Jupiter, where the site’s Western decans also give a share to Pluto, Uranus and Neptune.
• The use. A Western decan nuances a planet in its sign, most often the Sun, based on the date of birth. The D3 is a whole chart, with its own Ascendant and houses, read for one precise area: siblings, courage, initiative.

How accurate does the birth time need to be for the D3?

The D3 Ascendant changes sign about every forty minutes on average, three times as fast as the D1 Ascendant. The planets stay stable: only the Moon, which covers 10° in about eighteen hours, changes decan within the day. An exact time is therefore needed for the houses of the D3; without a time, the Vedic option is disabled on the site.

The long-form birth certificate often shows the time, and in France the full copy of the birth record does. If yours is rounded, calculate the chart twenty minutes earlier, then twenty minutes later: if the D3 Ascendant keeps its sign, read its houses with confidence; if it changes, rely mainly on the signs of the planets, which barely move. The rising sign calculator shows the same sensitivity to time.

How to open the D3 chart on My Birth Chart

The D3 is on your chart page, at the wheel. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto appear there in the background: classical Vedic astrology reads the seven visible planets and the nodes, Rahu and Ketu, the latter always placed opposite Rahu.

1. Calculate your chart with your date, exact time and place of birth.
2. At the wheel, choose Vedic (sidereal) instead of Tropical (Western): the D1 opens.
3. In the list of twenty divisional charts, choose D3.
4. The wheel, the positions (sign, degree, house) and the line that gives the chart’s meaning switch to the D3.

The site’s chat, Your chart answers you, also reads Vedic astrology, and the answer says clearly when it speaks in Vedic terms.