D-45 Akshavedamsha, the Chart of Character and Paternal Legacy

The Akshavedamsha chart, D-45, is the fifteenth of the sixteen divisional charts, formed by dividing each sign into forty-five parts. It signifies character and conduct and, in particular, the legacy inherited through the paternal line, the moral disposition and the fortunes passed down from the father's side. An astrologer consults the D-45 for questions of temperament, ethical nature, and patrilineal inheritance. The chart is one of the shodashavarga, the fine harmonic subdivisions through which jyotisha magnifies each department of a single nativity, and among the most detailed. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the divisional charts are a mathematical technique for drawing many focused readings from the one set of planetary longitudes recorded at the moment of birth.

Alongside the finer vargas generally, the exact division rule for the Akshavedamsha's forty-five parts is less uniformly given across classical and modern sources than the rules for the six major vargas, and its place in a working consultation is correspondingly narrower, typically brought in only when a client's question turns specifically on inherited character or on the paternal line, rather than consulted as a matter of course the way the Rashi and Navamsha are for virtually every reading.