Stems, branches and elements

What heavenly stems, earthly branches, the five elements and yin/yang each decide, where palace stems come from, and how soul and body stars are looked up.

For: everyone. Code is at the end of the page

Charting rests on stems and branches from beginning to end. Once this page makes sense, every two-character noun on a chart has somewhere to sit.

Ten stems and twelve branches

The ten heavenly stems: jia, yi, bing, ding, wu, ji, geng, xin, ren, gui (甲乙丙丁戊己庚辛壬癸). The twelve earthly branches: zi, chou, yin, mao, chen, si, woo, wei, shen, you, xu, hai (子丑寅卯辰巳午未申酉戌亥).

The two are paired off in order and cycle; the least common multiple of 10 and 12 is 60, so one round is the sexagenary cycle. Year, month, day and hour each get a pair, and together they are the four pillars:

geng chen   jia shen   bing woo   geng yin
  year        month       day        hour

Romanization vs. keys

The branch woo (午) is romanized woo in this library so that it does not collide with the stem wu (戊). In keys they are further apart still: the branch is wuEarthly, the stem is wuHeavenly. When you write code, use the keys and the collision never arises; the romanized spellings appear only in prose and in English chart output.

Yin the branch vs. yin the polarity

Two different things share a spelling in English. Yin (寅) is the third earthly branch — the Tiger, hour index 2 — and it is a yang branch. Yin (阴) is the negative pole of yin/yang. This page uses "the Yin branch" for the former and lower-case "yin" for the latter.

What each pillar decides

The four pillars are not parallel decoration; each drives a different part of charting:

Pillar	Drives
Year	Birth-year mutagens, soul and body stars, the stems of all twelve palaces, decadal direction, every year-derived star
Month	Display only; the month itself (not the month pillar) fixes the Soul palace and the month-derived stars such as Zuofu and Youbi
Day	Display only; the lunar day fixes where Ziwei starts and the day-derived stars such as Santai and Bazuo
Hour	Display only; the hour itself fixes the Soul palace, the Body palace and the hour-derived stars such as Wenchang and Wenqu

The year pillar carries the most weight

The reason the year turnover point (lunar New Year or the Beginning of Spring — 立春, the solar term around 4 February) is a configuration switch at all is that the year's stem and branch pull the most along with them: change it and the mutagens, the soul and body stars, and the palace stems all move. See Config in depth.

Yin and yang

Stems and branches each carry a polarity, alternating by ordinal parity: jia, bing, wu, geng, ren are yang and yi, ding, ji, xin, gui are yin; zi, yin, chen, woo, shen, xu are yang and chou, mao, si, wei, you, hai are yin.

The sexagenary cycle only ever pairs a stem with a branch of matching polarity (jiazi, yichou, …), so the stem and the branch of any pair always have the same polarity — "the polarity of the year stem" and "the polarity of the year branch" can never disagree. x-iztro always decides from the year branch.

Polarity does exactly one job in charting, but it is a consequential one — it sets direction:

Use	Rule
Decadal direction	Same polarity for gender and year branch → forward; different → backward
The twelve Changsheng gods	As above
The twelve Boshi gods	As above

Gender has a polarity too: male is yang, female is yin. So the mnemonic "yang man and yin woman go forward, yin man and yang woman go backward" is about exactly these three things. Age fortune is not among them — its direction depends on gender alone, see The twelve palaces.

The five elements

Metal, wood, water, fire, earth. Every heavenly stem and every earthly branch belongs to one of them.

Five elements ≠ Five Elements class

The names look alike; the roles do not overlap at all:

Five elements: an attribute of a single stem or branch, reference information.
Five Elements class: derived from the stem and branch of the Soul palace — water 2nd, wood 3rd, metal 4th, earth 5th, fire 6th — and it decides where Ziwei starts and at what age the decadals begin.

Don't mix them up in a predicate: the first is the fiveElements field of a stem or branch, the second is five_elements_class on the astrolabe.

Clashes

Earthly branches sit opposite one another; six positions apart is a clash: zi–woo, chou–wei, yin–shen, mao–you, chen–xu, si–hai.

This is precisely where the opposite palace comes from — with the twelve palaces in a ring, a palace and the one six positions away hold clashing branches, which is why the opposite palace has the most direct influence. Heavenly stems clash too (jia–geng, yi–xin, bing–ren, ding–gui); wu and ji sit at the centre and clash with nothing.

Where palace stems and branches come from

The branches of the twelve palaces are fixed: slot 0 is always the Yin palace and the last slot is always the Chou palace, without exception.

The stems are derived from the year stem by the Five Tigers rule (五虎遁): fix the stem of the Yin palace first, then run the remaining eleven forward in order. (It is called that because it starts at the Yin palace, the palace of the Tiger.) Take the chart used throughout these pages: the birth-year stem is geng, and a geng year starts the Yin palace at wu, giving these twelve palaces:

wuyin  jimao  gengchen  xinsi  renwoo  guiwei  jiashen  yiyou  bingxu  dinghai  wuzi  jichou

Palace stems are not ornamental — a palace stem decides which four mutagen stars that palace flies out, and that is the starting point of every flying-star predicate. See Mutagens and flying stars.

There is a companion Five Rats rule (五鼠遁), which derives the stem of the Zi hour from the day stem and is used to fix the hour pillar. (Zi is the branch of the Rat, hence the name.)

Soul star and body star

Each earthly branch maps to one soul star and one body star, by table lookup. The two are looked up from different things:

	Looked up from	When the Soul palace is rearranged
Soul star (default school)	The Soul palace branch	Changes
Soul star (Zhongzhou school)	The birth-year branch	Unchanged
Body star	The birth-year branch	Unchanged

Zhongzhou moves the soul star onto the year branch too

Under algorithm = zhongzhou the soul star is looked up from the birth-year branch, so rearranging the chart onto another Soul palace (rearranged, or switching between the heaven / earth / human plate) no longer moves it. Under the default school the soul star follows the Soul palace. See Config in depth.

In code

Stems, branches, elements, the Five Tigers and Five Rats rules, and the soul and body stars are all exposed as data tables; there is no need to copy the tables yourself.

from x_iztro import data

data.heavenly_stems()["jiaHeavenly"].five_elements   # 木 (wood)
data.earthly_branches()["ziEarthly"].yin_yang        # 阳 (yang)
data.earthly_branches()["ziEarthly"].crash           # wuEarthly (zi clashes with woo)
data.heavenly_stems()["wuHeavenly"].crash            # None (wu clashes with nothing)

data.constants().tiger_rule["jiaHeavenly"]           # bingHeavenly (a jia year starts the Yin palace at bing)
data.constants().rat_rule["jiaHeavenly"]             # jiaHeavenly
data.constants().five_elements_class                 # {'earth5th': 5, ... 'wood3rd': 3}

zi = data.earthly_branches()["ziEarthly"]
zi.soul    # tanlangMaj — soul star
zi.body    # huoxingMin — body star

The data tables are not translated

five_elements and yin_yang come back as the raw Chinese characters (木, 阳) whatever the chart language, because they are table values rather than chart output. Everything else in these tables is a key, which is language-independent by construction.

The language-independent keys for the four pillars live under raw_dates.chinese_date as yearly_keys / monthly_keys / daily_keys / hourly_keys; the top-level chinese_date is the display string.

Concept	Data table	Constant
Heavenly stem info	`data.heavenly_stems()`	—
Earthly branch info	`data.earthly_branches()`	—
Five Tigers rule	—	`constants().tiger_rule`
Five Rats rule	—	`constants().rat_rule`
Gender polarity	—	`constants().gender`
Five Elements class numbers	—	`constants().five_elements_class`

Field-by-field notes are on the data table page for Rust, Python and Go.

Stems, branches and elements

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