In the chart you already know, children are one house: the 5th. Vedic astrology takes that question, cuts every sign into seven, and builds a whole second chart out of it — the saptamsa, or D7 — and a centuries-old Sanskrit text, the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, gives that chart exactly one subject: "in the saptamamsha, that of sons and grandsons"8.2.
That one line is all the book says the D7 is for. Here is what it means, how to draw yours in a few minutes, and the questions these verses do not answer, however often they are asked of this chart.
The one subject this book gives the D7
The text hands each of its sixteen divisional charts a single part of life, and the list runs fast. Your birth chart is read for the body, the hora for wealth8.1. Then a short stretch looks outward, at the people around you: the drekkana at happiness from brothers and sisters, the chaturthamsa at fortune, and the saptamsa at "sons and grandsons"8.2. The next line gives the spouse to the navamsa, great deeds to the dashamsa, and parents to the dvadashamsa8.3.
"Sons and grandsons" is putra-pautra — the language of a time that counted a family's line through its sons. Read today it means your children and their children, daughters as much as sons, and that is how we read it on every page.
Notice where it points. Your birth chart is about you. Your partner chart, the navamsa, is about someone you may already have met. The saptamsa is about people who may not exist yet, or who are small now and will one day have lives of their own. It is the only chart on this list that looks a generation forward. That is a tender place to stand, and it is worth standing in it carefully.
Where the saptamsa falls among the sixteen
The rest of that chapter is brisk. Comfort, discomfort and vehicles get the sixteenth division, and upasana, devotional practice, the twentieth8.4. Learning gets its own chart; strength and weakness another; the thirtieth division carries "the fruit of arishta", misfortune8.5. In the finest divisions, the text says simply that "one should examine everything"8.6.
Then it raises its voice once, for the D60. Where the ruler of a cruel sixtieth sits, the text reads destruction there, "no doubt, as is the word of the ancients"8.7; where a kind ruler of that division sits, it reads increase and nourishment8.8. Those two lines belong to the D60, not to your saptamsa. I tell you them anyway, because they show how this book talks: the hard result and the good one in the same breath, neither softened. The saptamsa itself is the fifth name in the text's own list of the sixteen6.2, with one question to hold and no promises attached.
Drawing your saptamsa by hand, in sevenths
Seven equal parts to a sign, each about 4°17′ wide. The counting rule sits in a single verse6.9:
- Odd signs — Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, Aquarius — count the seven parts from that sign itself.
- Even signs — Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, Pisces — count from the seventh sign after it.
Work one through. Say your Moon sits at 10° Taurus. Taurus is even, so start from the seventh sign along, Scorpio. Ten degrees falls in the third seventh, roughly 8°34′ to 12°51′. Count three signs from Scorpio — Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn — and your Moon is in Capricorn in the saptamsa. Do the same for every planet and for your rising degree, and you have the chart.
Why do even signs start somewhere else? The verse gives the rule and not the reason. Several of the divisional rules in this chapter are built that way, and when the book withholds a reason we do not supply one.
The seven oceans that preside over the parts
The very next verse gives each seventh a presiding "ocean", and it is one of the loveliest lists in the book: salt water, milk, curd, ghee, sugarcane juice, wine and pure water, in that order for odd signs and in reverse, beginning with pure water, for even ones6.10.
The text records the seven and builds no rule on them here — no result, no reading, nothing to look up. Later traditions have given them meanings. These verses do not, so neither do we. They are on the page because the book put them there, and because a chart of the generation after you being measured out in milk and ghee and sugarcane juice tells you something about the mind that wrote it.
Why seventeen minutes of birth time can move your D7
Your D7 houses are counted from the saptamsa of your rising degree, and the rising degree crosses a whole seventh in about seventeen minutes on average. Fifteen minutes of error in a recorded birth time can slide a planet from one house of this chart into the next, and the reading moves with it.
So before anyone reads you anything from a saptamsa, the honest first question is how sure you are of the time. A time remembered years later is a different instrument from a time written on a hospital record. We say the same about how we read this book by machine: a chart is only as good as the minute it was cast from.
Number, sex and timing: what these verses never answer
The questions people bring to the D7 are the sharpest questions there are — how many, when, and whether at all. So it matters to say plainly what this book does not do here.
Search all 4,197 verses of our corpus for the saptamsa and eleven lines come back. They name it in the list of sixteen6.2, give the counting rule6.9, give the seven oceans6.10 and name its subject8.2; the rest place it in scoring and period tables elsewhere in the book. Not one of them counts children, names a child's sex, or dates a conception. There is no verse here that answers "how many", and none that answers "when".
Anything touching fertility, pregnancy or a child's health belongs with a doctor, and nothing on this page is medical advice or a prediction. A chart is not a diagnosis, and the book does not pretend otherwise: it tells you which chart holds the question, not what the answer is.
What the saptamsa is read for today that this book does not say
The D7 is read now for romance and attraction, and for creative work — your projects as the children of your mind. Those are modern readings, and some come from other texts; they are not in these verses. This book gives the saptamsa children and grandchildren8.2 and gives the spouse to a different chart entirely, the navamsa8.3. Where a reading is not in the book we are citing, we leave it out and say that we have.
Reading a planet in your saptamsa
Every D7 page we write starts from that one line: this chart is read for children8.2. So when we look at the Sun, Mercury and Venus together in the 12th of the D7, the question is what those three, in the house of loss and letting go, mean inside the chart of the generation after you — not what they mean in general.
Most placements in the D7 have no verse of their own. This book rarely says "this planet in this house of the saptamsa gives this". Where it does not, we say so and read the placement from its parts, the way we do with the career chart, the D10. That is slower than inventing an answer, and it is the only way to stay honest with a book that gives each chart a subject rather than a list of outcomes.
Questions to sit with before you read your D7
- How sure am I of my birth time, to the quarter hour?
- What am I actually hoping this chart will tell me — and would an answer change anything I do?
- If the book gives this chart one subject and no outcomes, what would be useful to learn from it?
- Who is the "generation after" I am thinking about, if it is not a child of my own?
D7 chart: questions people ask
What is the D7 chart in Vedic astrology?
What does the saptamsa chart show?
Can the D7 say how many children someone has, or a child's sex?
Not from these verses. The eleven lines in our corpus that name the saptamsa give its subject, its counting rule and its seven oceans, and none of them counts children or names a sex.
How do I calculate my D7 by hand?
Take each planet's degree in its sign, find which seventh of 4°17′ it falls in, then count that many signs from the sign itself if the sign is odd, or from the seventh sign along if it is even6.9.
Is the D7 the same as the 5th house of my birth chart?
Why do odd and even signs count differently?
The verse states the rule without a reason6.9, and we do not invent one.
Your own saptamsa
Your saptamsa depends on your birth time to within minutes. Your reading casts every divisional chart the text uses and says, verse by verse, what it finds in yours — the D7 among them, drawn from your exact time and checked against the same verses this page cites, with no forecast attached to any of it.