Karakamsa Lagna in My Chart

Take the seven planets from the Sun to Saturn and look at how far each one has travelled into the sign it occupies. The one that has travelled furthest is your Atmakaraka, the planet the Jaimini system treats as standing in for the self. Now take that single planet and find its sign in the Navamsa, the chart made by dividing every sign into nine equal parts of 3°20' each and giving each part a sign of its own. The sign it lands in there is your Karakamsa.

There is a third step, and it is the one that decides everything after it. You carry that sign name back to your birth chart and read it as a position there. If your Atmakaraka's Navamsa sign is Taurus, then Taurus in your birth chart is your Karakamsa, and the planets sitting in Taurus in your birth chart, along with the planets throwing an aspect onto it, are what the technique reads. Counting houses from that sign gives you the Karakamsa lagna, the projected frame the Jaimini texts use in place of the lagna, which is the sign rising on the eastern horizon at the moment of birth.

So the answer is a sign name, and no general statement can supply it. It depends on which of your seven planets happens to sit deepest into its sign, and then on which ninth of that sign the planet occupies. Two people born in the same city on the same morning, forty minutes apart, can end up reading two different signs.

The two steps, stated completely

Step one is a ranking. Every planet has a longitude, and subtracting the start of its sign leaves a degree inside that sign between 0 and 30. Rank the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn by that number, highest first. The winner is the Atmakaraka. Ketu is never in the ranking, because it sits exactly 180° from Rahu and therefore always carries the identical degree inside its sign, which would put a guaranteed tie into every chart. Rahu is left out under the seven-planet count this page uses, and the case for including it is laid out in full below.

Step two is a lookup, and it has one rule worth memorising. Each sign is cut into nine parts of 3°20'. Where the count of those nine parts begins depends on the element of the sign the planet is in: fire signs start counting from Aries, earth signs from Capricorn, air signs from Libra, and water signs from Cancer. From that starting sign you count forward in the normal zodiac order as many places as the ninth-part number, less one.

An example makes it concrete. Venus at 24°45'21" of Gemini. Gemini is an air sign, so the count starts at Libra. 24°45'21" divided by 3°20' is 7.4, and rounding that down and adding one puts Venus in the eighth ninth-part. Count seven places forward from Libra, giving Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus. Venus lands in Taurus, and Taurus is the Karakamsa for that chart.

Step three has no arithmetic in it at all. Taurus is Taurus. You look at Taurus in the birth chart, note what is in it, note what is looking at it, and count the 5th and the 12th signs onward from it. The sign travels between two charts, and that is the part worth slowing down for: a reader who treats the Karakamsa as a place inside the Navamsa and stops there is left with a sign and nothing to read in it, because the planets the technique interprets are the birth-chart ones.

Which sign your Karakamsa lands in is not a coin toss

Across 100,000 charts computed for this page, the Karakamsa fell in a dual sign (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius or Pisces) 58.89% of the time. An even split across twelve signs would put those four at 33.3%. Fixed signs took 27.82% and movable signs took 13.29%.

Gemini is five times more likely than Aries. That is a large enough gap to need a reason, and the reason is arithmetic rather than doctrine.

The Atmakaraka is defined as the planet at the highest degree in its sign, so it is systematically a late-degree planet. In the same 100,000 charts, 54.18% of Atmakarakas sat in the ninth ninth-part of their sign and a further 26.66% sat in the eighth. Four charts in five have an Atmakaraka in the last two ninths.

Now apply the start rule to those last two ninths. The ninth ninth-part of any fire sign is Sagittarius, of any earth sign Virgo, of any air sign Gemini, and of any water sign Pisces. The eighth ninth-part of a fire sign is Scorpio, of an earth sign Leo, of an air sign Taurus, and of a water sign Aquarius. Twelve signs collapse onto four destinations at the ninth part and onto four more at the eighth, which is exactly the two tiers the table shows.

So a Karakamsa in Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn means something the common case does not: the Atmakaraka was not a late-degree planet by the usual margin, and won the ranking from further back in its sign. In the 100,000 charts that happened 13.29% of the time.

The house the Karakamsa occupies, counted from the lagna, carries no such bias. Every house from the 1st to the 12th took between 8.19% and 8.45% of charts, which is flat within sampling noise. The Karakamsa is the same sign as the lagna in 8.29% of charts, close to the one-in-twelve you would expect.

Working it out by hand

Everything above is checkable with your own chart printout and no software. It is worth doing once, because working the ranking by hand shows you the margin between the top two planets, and that margin is what decides how solid the answer is.

1. Write down the degree inside sign for the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. Not the whole longitude, only the part after the sign. Use the minutes and seconds, because two planets inside the same whole degree are common and the winner is decided in the minutes.
2. Take the largest. That planet is your Atmakaraka.
3. Divide its degree inside sign by 3.3333. Round down and add one. That is the ninth-part number, from 1 to 9.
4. Look up the start sign for the element: Aries for Aries, Leo and Sagittarius; Capricorn for Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn; Libra for Gemini, Libra and Aquarius; Cancer for Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces.
5. Count forward from that start sign by the ninth-part number minus one. The sign you land on is your Karakamsa.
6. Return to your birth chart. Find that sign. List what sits in it, list what aspects it, and count the 5th and 12th signs forward from it.

On aspects, so that step six leaves nothing open: every planet aspects the sign opposite its own, meaning the 7th counting inclusively from where it sits. Mars also aspects the 4th and the 8th from itself, Jupiter the 5th and the 9th, Saturn the 3rd and the 10th, and Rahu and Ketu the 5th and the 9th. The Sun, the Moon, Mercury and Venus reach the 7th and nothing else.

Where a hand calculation and a computed chart disagree, the usual cause is the degree rather than the arithmetic. Printouts commonly round to two decimal places, which is 36 arcseconds, and two planets separated by less than that will be ranked by whichever one the printout happened to list first.

Chart A, read end to end

Born 21 July 1979, 13:40, Chennai. Libra rises at 25°55', in Vishakha pada 2.

One column in the table below needs a word first. Dignity is the standing a planet has in whichever sign it is sitting in. It runs from exalted at the top, which is the single sign where a planet acts with most support, through own sign, meaning a sign the planet itself rules, down to debilitated, which is the sign where it acts with least support. Neutral is everything in between.

Venus wins the ranking by 38 arcminutes over Mars, and it wins it from Gemini, where the sign neither strengthens nor weakens it. The ranking pays no attention to that. A debilitated planet at 28° beats an exalted one at 12°, because the only quantity being compared is distance into the sign.

The Karakamsa is Taurus. Venus's Navamsa sign is its own sign, which is the 13.30% case where the Atmakaraka lands in a sign it rules. The Karakamsa lord and the Atmakaraka are therefore the same planet, so the reading does not have to pass through a second planet to find its owner.

Taurus is the 8th sign from Libra rising, which puts the Karakamsa in the house of what is hidden, inherited and undergone. Mars occupies it at 24°06'54", and Mars is the Amatyakaraka, the second rung of the same ladder and the one the tradition reads for work and for the person's public vehicle. Saturn in Leo throws its 10th aspect onto Taurus. Nothing else looks at it.

Put together, the frame this chart hands its owner is a Karakamsa ruled by the Atmakaraka itself, occupied by the planet that stands for the working life, and watched by one planet only. Saturn being the sole aspect matters, because a single aspect has nothing in the sign to be weighed against.

The 12th from the Karakamsa is Aries, which is the 7th house of this chart. It is empty, and its ruler is Mars. Mars is sitting in the Karakamsa itself. So the sign the tradition reads for release hands the question straight back to the planet standing in the Karakamsa, and the reading closes on itself rather than running off to a fourth place.

The 5th from the Karakamsa is Virgo, the 12th house here, also empty, ruled by Mercury. Mercury sits in Cancer in the 10th house with Jupiter and the Sun. So what the 5th from the Karakamsa has to say arrives through Mercury from the house of public work.

Venus's own chain of rulers runs Venus to Mercury to the Moon and back to Mercury, a loop rather than a root, meaning no planet in it settles the question without the others. Its nakshatra is Punarvasu pada 2, ruled by Jupiter, presided over by Aditi, symbolised by a bow and quiver, and recorded with the quality "renewal, return, restoration". A nakshatra is a 13°20' segment of the sky with its own ruling planet, so the Atmakaraka here answers to Jupiter at that layer, on top of Venus's own nature.

Recomputing this chart at plus and minus 15, 30 and 60 minutes returns Venus and Taurus every time. The reading is not sitting on a knife edge.

Chart B, read end to end

Born 13 May 1984, 19:10, Delhi. Scorpio rises at 1°33', in Vishakha pada 4.

The Sun takes the ladder at 29°19'56" of Aries, 40 arcminutes short of leaving the sign, and Aries is the Sun's exaltation, which is the strongest standing a sign gives a planet. Aries is a fire sign and 29°19'56" falls in the ninth ninth-part, so the Karakamsa is Sagittarius, exactly as the table of ninth parts predicts for a late-degree planet in a fire sign.

Sagittarius is the 2nd sign from Scorpio rising. Jupiter occupies it at 19°01'51" in its own sign, and Jupiter also rules Sagittarius, so the Karakamsa lord is sitting inside the Karakamsa. That is the 9.65% case. Jupiter's chain of rulers is zero steps long and ends on itself, so this sign answers to one planet and that planet is at home in it. Saturn in Libra throws its 3rd aspect onto Sagittarius, and nothing else looks at the sign.

The 5th from the Karakamsa is Aries, the 6th house here, and it is crowded. The Sun, Mercury and Venus all sit in it, and the Sun sitting there is the Atmakaraka itself. Four aspects land on it as well. The Moon, Mars and Saturn are all in Libra and all three aspect Aries from opposite, and Jupiter reaches it with its 5th aspect from Sagittarius. So the Karakamsa and the 5th from it are tied to each other twice over in this chart, by Jupiter's aspect running one way and by the Atmakaraka's own placement running the other.

The 12th from the Karakamsa is Scorpio. Scorpio is also the rising sign of this chart, so the sign the tradition reads for release is the same sign that carries the person's outward identity. Ketu occupies it, which is the 8.23% case, and Rahu aspects it from opposite. The ruler of Scorpio is Mars, sitting in Libra in the 12th house.

The Sun's nakshatra is Krittika pada 1, ruled by the Sun itself, presided over by Agni, symbolised by a razor and a flame, and recorded with the quality "purification, sharpness, nurturing". Its chain of rulers runs Sun to Mars to Venus and back to Mars, a loop of two.

Recomputed at plus and minus 15, 30 and 60 minutes, this chart also returns the Sun and Sagittarius every time. A planet 40 arcminutes from the end of its sign is hard to dislodge from the top of a degree ranking, because every other planet would have to be further into its own sign than 29°19'.

When nothing sits in your Karakamsa

Almost half of charts have an empty Karakamsa. In the 100,000-chart study, 46.84% had no planet at all in that sign, 31.32% had exactly one, and 14.53% had two.

Aspects fill most of the gap. 16.39% of charts have no planet aspecting the Karakamsa, and the two conditions overlap: 6.44% of charts have a Karakamsa that is both empty and unaspected. So about one reader in sixteen finds a sign with nothing standing in it and nothing looking at it.

That case has a defined answer. Where nothing occupies or aspects the sign, the reading passes to the sign's ruler, and you read that planet's own sign, house and condition as the description of the Karakamsa. Chart A above does exactly that one step along: the 12th from its Karakamsa is empty Aries, so the reading passes to Mars, which rules Aries.

The ruler route is also worth taking even when the sign is occupied, because it answers a different question. A planet sitting in the Karakamsa describes what is present in that part of the life. The ruler describes where that part of the life is finally administered from, which can be a different house entirely.

Which planet turns up there is close to even. The seven ranked planets each run a little above the one-in-twelve you would expect from chance, and the reason is on the table already: in 18.55% of charts the Atmakaraka is itself standing in its own Karakamsa, so one seat is often taken before any other planet is considered.

The 5th from the Karakamsa

Counting five signs forward from the Karakamsa, inclusively, gives the sign the Jaimini tradition reads for learned knowledge, for mantra, and for what the person is credited with from before this life. The 5th house counted from the lagna carries the same subjects, and the technique borrows the meaning and moves the starting point.

The 5th from the Karakamsa is occupied slightly more often than the Karakamsa itself. Across the study it was empty in 45.07% of charts, against 46.84% for the Karakamsa, and Venus turned up there in 10.25% of charts, more often than any other planet.

What that sign names is the instrument rather than the destination. A planet standing there describes something the person has already been handed and can work with, which is why the tradition reads it for study and for practice rather than for outcome. Chart B above has three planets in that sign, one of them the Atmakaraka, putting it at the crowded end of the distribution. Chart A has none, so the question passes to Mercury, which rules the sign and sits in the 10th house.

The 12th from the Karakamsa, and the question about protection

One reader put the question this way in chart chat: "so yeah you mentioned multiple Gods who is the foremost protector who will come if i call him and mitigate all negative energies?" Nineteen distinct users asked some version of it. It has a real answer in this technique, and the answer runs through the 12th from the Karakamsa.

Counting twelve signs forward from the Karakamsa lands on the sign immediately behind it. The 12th house counted from the lagna is the house of what is spent, released and let go, and read from the planet that stands in for the self it is taken as what the self is finishing rather than what it is accumulating. The planet found there is read as the one carrying that work, and by extension as the deity through whom the person is best placed to ask for help.

Two facts about that sign, before anything is read from it. It is empty in 54.20% of charts, more often than the Karakamsa itself, so a majority of readers must take the sign's ruler instead of an occupant. And the planet most often found there is Ketu, at 8.23%, marginally ahead of the Moon and Saturn at 7.68% and 7.67%. The order of that table is worth seeing, because the tradition's most quoted case is Ketu in the 12th from the Karakamsa and the data says it is a one-in-twelve event rather than a rarity.

To answer the reader's question rather than restate it: the planet you are looking for is whichever one occupies the 12th from your Karakamsa, and if that sign is empty, the ruler of that sign. Sources differ on which deity belongs to which planet, so here is the pairing AstroMedha uses on its own prayer cards, stated once and used consistently.

The last two rows carry a deity and no mantra because the prayer cards pair a short mantra with the seven ranked planets only. Where the answer lands on Rahu or Ketu, the deity is the part to use.

Chart B above resolves to Ketu, because Ketu occupies Scorpio and Scorpio is the 12th from that chart's Sagittarius Karakamsa. Chart A has an empty 12th in Aries, so it resolves to the ruler, Mars, and Mars is sitting in the Karakamsa itself, which makes the same planet the occupant of the frame and the keeper of its exit.

The answer is specific to one chart, which is the whole reason it is worth having. A deity recommended to everyone who asks is a recommendation that used none of the person's own birth details. This page absorbs and replaces Atmakaraka and Moksha, which described the same 12th-from-Karakamsa reading without computing it.

What a wrong birth time does to this

Both steps depend on the clock, and it is fair to ask how much. On a 20,000-chart subset, each chart was recomputed at plus and minus 15, 30 and 60 minutes and the answers compared.

Read the two columns separately. At a quarter of an hour either way, the Atmakaraka moves in 2.12% of charts and the Karakamsa moves in 2.73%. At an hour either way, 8.09% and 10.39%. The Karakamsa moves slightly more often than the Atmakaraka because it can also move when the Atmakaraka stays put: the same planet can cross a 3°20' ninth-part boundary without losing the top of the ranking.

Those numbers are low because the fastest bodies are usually not what is being ranked. For comparison, the rising sign turns over about every two hours, so a 15-minute error moves it in roughly one chart in eight. The Moon covers about half a degree an hour, and anything keyed to the Moon moves with it, but the Moon wins this particular ranking in only 14.85% of charts and the other six planets crawl by comparison.

The average is not the number that matters to any individual reader, though. A chart with two planets within a few arcminutes of each other at the top of the ladder is a different case from a chart where the winner is clear, and the margin between the top two rungs is what tells you which one you have. In Chart A that margin was 38 arcminutes and in Chart B it was 2°55', and neither chart moved at an hour of error either way.

The other input is place, and it matters less here than it does for the lagna. The ranking uses degrees inside signs, which do not depend on where on Earth the birth happened. Longitude and latitude enter only through the conversion of local clock time to universal time and through the houses. Two births at the same instant in Delhi and Chennai share an Atmakaraka and a Karakamsa but not the same house for it.

Seven planets or eight

A reader who checks two websites can get two different Atmakarakas, and the reason is a fork in the tradition rather than a bug in either site. Jaimini's sutra reads saptanam astanam va, "of the seven, or of the eight", and the question is whether Rahu joins the ranking. K. N. Rao and Iranganti Rangacharya teach seven. Others include Rahu, keyed by 30 minus its degree, because Rahu enters a sign at 30° and leaves at 0°.

AstroMedha ranks seven, and says so on every result rather than leaving it implied. Ketu is excluded by arithmetic rather than by choice: Ketu is always exactly 180° from Rahu, and 180 divides by 30 with nothing left over, so Ketu's degree inside its sign is identical to Rahu's in every chart ever cast. A nine-body ranking is a seven-body ranking with a guaranteed tie in it.

How much does the fork actually cost? Across the 100,000 charts, adding Rahu moved the Atmakaraka in 12.40% of them and moved the Karakamsa in 11.59%. So roughly one reader in eight would see a different sign under the other count, and seven in eight would see the same one. In both worked charts above the two schemes agree on the Atmakaraka and differ only on lower rungs. The full argument sits on Seven Karakas or Eight?.

Retrograde planets, meaning the ones that appear from Earth to move backwards through the zodiac for a stretch of weeks or months, are not reversed here. The 30-minus-degree treatment belongs to Rahu alone, for the specific reason that Rahu's motion through a sign runs backwards from beginning to end. A planet that is temporarily going backwards still entered its sign at 0°, so its degree inside the sign still measures the distance it has travelled through the sign.

What 100,000 charts say

The percentages on this page come from one study, with a second one run to check it. The main study drew 100,000 births uniformly between 1 January 1975 and 31 December 2005, clock times uniform across the full 24 hours, birthplaces drawn from ten Indian cities, seed 20260826, positions from the Swiss Ephemeris with the Lahiri ayanamsa and the mean node. The check repeated 30,000 of the same measurements over births from 1 January 1900 to 31 December 2100, and its results are given alongside the ones they move.

Which planet holds the office is close to even, with one apparent exception that turns out not to be about astrology at all.

The second column is there because the first one is not a fact about astrology. Jupiter's shortfall is a fact about the birth window. Repeating the measurement over births from 1900 to 2100 puts all seven planets between 13.58% and 15.50%, and Jupiter's share rises by nearly three points. The underlying quantity moves with it: the chance of finding Jupiter in the last ninth of its sign is 7.94% for births in the 31-year window and 10.86% over the 200-year one, against 11.11% for an even spread. Jupiter crosses a sign in about a year, so a 31-year sample contains only about two and a half of its circuits and never averages out.

The dual-sign finding survives the same test, which is why it leads this page. The check measured it at 59.13% for the narrow window and 60.26% for the wide one, against 58.89% in the main study, so all three agree within about a point. A dual-sign Karakamsa is a consequence of the ninth-part start rule rather than of who was born when, so changing the window leaves it where it was.

Getting your own computed

The public half of this page is the whole method. You can find your Karakamsa with a chart printout, a calculator and the ninth-part table above, and the two worked charts show what a full reading of one looks like from the first rung to the deity.

What a computed reading adds is the part that is tedious and easy to get wrong by hand. Enter your date, time and place once and AstroMedha returns:

• The full seven-rung ladder at unrounded precision, with each planet's degree to the arcsecond, so you can see how close the call was rather than only who won.
• Your Karakamsa sign, its ruler, and which house it falls in counted from your lagna.
• Everything sitting in that sign in your birth chart, and every planet throwing an aspect onto it, with the aspect named.
• The 5th and the 12th from your Karakamsa, their occupants, their rulers, and where those rulers sit when the signs are empty, which is the case for about half of readers.
• The margin between your top two rungs, and the result of actually recomputing your chart at plus and minus 15 minutes rather than estimating it, so you know whether your reading depends on the accuracy of your recorded birth time.
• What the eight-planet count would have returned for the same chart, and which rungs it moves.

A birth time you are unsure of is worth entering anyway. The recomputation tells you whether the uncertainty touches this particular answer, and for about 97 charts in 100 at a quarter-hour of error, it does not.

Related reading

• Atmakaraka: the planet that carries your self is the hub for the whole technique.
• What Is Atmakaraka? covers step one of this page on its own.
• How to Calculate Your Atmakaraka by Hand is the long version of the ranking, including the tie-break.
• Atmakaraka and Karakamsa in the Navamsa is the short definition of the term.
• Atmakaraka and Moksha is absorbed by the 12th-from-Karakamsa section above.
• Seven Karakas or Eight? settles which planets are eligible.
• Amatyakaraka and Atmakaraka covers the second rung, which occupied the Karakamsa in Chart A.
• Venus as Atmakaraka and Sun as Atmakaraka are the two planets that held the office in the worked charts.