Four Pillars of Destiny — Your Chart and Major Luck Cycles, for Men

Your chart

In each pillar, the upper part is the Heavenly Stem and the lower part is the Earthly Branch. The pillar with the red frame is the Day Pillar, which represents you yourself. The small text under a Heavenly Stem is its Ten God as seen from your Day Stem, and the characters inside an Earthly Branch are its Hidden Stems (stems held to be contained within the branch) and their Ten Gods. If you left your time of birth blank, guidance is shown in the Hour Pillar column.

Your central star — reading your Day Stem

Reading by pillar

The Year Pillar, Month Pillar and Day Pillar (and the Hour Pillar, if you gave a time) each have a set period and theme they cover. We read each pillar from the Ten God appearing in yours.

Reading by topic

Your Day Stem nature, layered with the colouring of the Ten Gods appearing in your chart, read topic by topic.

Balance of the Five Elements

A count, by element (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water), of the Heavenly Stems and Hidden Stems in your chart. An element you have in quantity tends to show on the surface, and an element you have little of is said to bring the whole into balance when you consciously make up for it.

Major Luck — the flow in 10-year blocks

Major Luck is a measure that reads life in 10-year blocks. Starting from the Month Pillar, the pillar moves on every 10 years. Because this corner is for men, the direction of movement (forward / reverse) is calculated the male way. The age at which it changes is a guide, estimated from the number of days from your birth date to the nearest seasonal turning point before or after it.

Reading your later years — from the Hour Pillar

How you spend the second half of life, and tendencies that tend to appear in later years, are read from the Hour Pillar, which is derived from your time of birth.

What the Ten Gods mean

The Ten Gods divide the relationship between your Day Stem and the other stems into ten kinds. Stars that appear in your chart and your Major Luck cycles are marked at the start of their row.

Basis of the calculation

• The Year Pillar changes at the Start of Spring. It does not change on 1 January: before the Start of Spring in a given year, you are counted under the previous year's Year Pillar.
• The Month Pillar changes at the seasonal turning points (the solar-term entries). The division of the months is not the 1st of the calendar month, but the entry days of terms such as Start of Spring, Awakening of Insects and Pure Brightness. The entry days are calculated from the position of the Sun (its ecliptic longitude).
• The Day Pillar is counted exactly as the sexagenary cycle of the calendar. The cycle repeats every 60 days, and the stem-branch of your birth day becomes your Day Pillar as it is.
• Major Luck proceeds from the Month Pillar. For a man, if the Heavenly Stem of his birth year is yang, it proceeds in order to the next pillar after the Month Pillar (forward); if it is yin, it proceeds in reverse to the previous pillar (reverse). The age at which Major Luck starts is a guide found by counting the days from the birth date — to the next term entry if forward, to the previous term entry if reverse — at a rate of 3 days = 1 year.
• The Hour Pillar is optional. Only if you know your time of birth do we derive the Hour Pillar from the two-hour division and your Day Stem, and show the reading for your later years as well. If it is blank, the places for the Hour Pillar and the later-years reading show “Enter your time of birth and you can see this too”, and the other readings are given from the three pillars of year, month and day.