Origin 500 to 600 CE
The Hora (D-2) divides each sign into two halves or horas, one belonging to the Sun and one to the Moon (in odd signs the first half is solar and the second lunar, and the reverse in even signs). It is the divisional chart of wealth, resources, and sustenance, examining financial prosperity and the capacity to earn and accumulate. Planets falling in the Sun hora are read for one kind of resourcefulness and those in the Moon hora for another. Among the vargas it is the principal indicator of material means and the flow of income and expense.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period500 to 600 CE 1Tradition: Brihat Jataka (Varahamihira) Origin Period600 to 800 CE 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra One of the shodashavarga, the sixteen divisional charts set out in the extant Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra. Nine of the sixteen appear only in this later layer; the graded schemes of six, seven, ten and sixteen divisions are the text's own, and the sixteen-fold set is not attested in the earlier literature. Origin PeriodThis divisional chart appears in Varahamihira's Brihat Jataka; Pingree's survey of jyotihsastra literature situates that text within the sixth century CE of classical Sanskrit horoscopy. 1Tradition: Brihat Jataka (Varahamihira) Origin PeriodThis divisional chart is also set out in the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, which Pingree's survey situates within the sixth to eighth century CE stratum of classical Sanskrit horoscopy, alongside its earlier attestation in Varahamihira's Brihat Jataka. 1Tradition: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra Origin of the Name"Hora" is a Greek loanword, from hora, "hour". It came into Sanskrit with Greek horoscopy, and it is also the word that names the whole genethlialogical branch, hora shastra. Two of the sixteen divisions are named in Greek, and this is one of them. 2 Attributed Author / CompilerParashara, to whom the Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra ascribes itself. The ascription is pseudepigraphic: Parashara is a sage of the epic and puranic literature, the extant text is a compilation of roughly the seventh to eighth century with later interpolation, and its surviving manuscripts are of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The system is "Parashari" by convention, not by authorship. 1 Attributions
GovernsWealth, resources, sustenance 1 Learn More
D-2 Hora, the Chart of Wealth
The Hora chart, D-2, is the second divisional chart, formed by splitting each sign of the zodiac into two halves of fifteen degrees each. It signifies wealth, resources, and sustenance, the capacity to acquire and hold material means. In the classical scheme the two horas of each sign are assigned to the Sun and the Moon, and a planet's placement in a solar or lunar hora is read for its bearing on prosperity. The Hora is one of the sixteen divisional charts (shodashavarga) through which jyotisha examines a single nativity, each chart magnifying one department of life. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the divisional charts are a harmonic technique for drawing many focused readings from the same planetary longitudes of the birth moment.
The division follows a fixed alternation: in the odd signs, Aries, Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius and Aquarius, the first fifteen degrees belong to the Sun's hora and the second fifteen to the Moon's, while in the even signs the order reverses, the Moon taking the first half and the Sun the second. In the classical Parashari presentation the D-2 chart is unusual among the sixteen for collapsing the whole zodiac down to only two occupied positions: every planet falling in a solar hora is placed in Leo, the Sun's own sign, and every planet in a lunar hora is placed in Cancer, the Moon's, so that the finished Hora chart shows at most two signs holding all nine grahas between them rather than a planet-by-planet spread across twelve.
D-2 in Practice: Two Halves That Are Not Twelve Signs
One division of the Hora spans 15 degrees, half a sign, and there are twenty four of them in the zodiac. The ascendant crosses fifteen degrees in roughly an hour, so of all the divisional charts the D-2 is the least sensitive to a doubtful birth time. A person who knows the hour but not the minute still has a usable Hora.
The D-2 is also the odd one out in the scheme, and the reason is worth stating plainly. In the Parashari rule the two halves of a sign are not assigned to two of the twelve signs. They are assigned to the Sun and the Moon, so a planet in the D-2 falls in a solar half or a lunar half and nowhere else. Some astrologers therefore decline to cast the Hora as a chart at all and read it only as a two-way classification bearing on wealth and sustenance, while others map the solar half to Leo and the lunar half to Cancer in order to produce something a chart-drawing program can display. Those two practices give different-looking output from identical longitudes, and a reader comparing two Hora charts should establish which convention is in front of them before concluding anything.
Despite that irregularity the Hora sits in all four classical groupings, the shadvarga, saptavarga, dashavarga and shodashavarga, on the strength of its subject matter rather than its structure.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Originates in Language
The term is Sanskrit, and the technical vocabulary of the Panchanga and of jyotisha more widely is Sanskrit throughout, whatever the vernacular in which a given almanac is printed. The name is a Sanskrit term. Regional almanacs render it in the local script and pronunciation, so a reader will meet the same term in several transliterations without any difference of reference.
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