Definition

Pillars of Destiny or also known as Four Pillars, Eight Characters (ba zi). It is an ancient Chinese Art of Feng Shui Fortune Telling which can reveal lots of information about a person's destiny from a person's date of birth.

Basic Information required

• Name of Person
• Gender (Male or Female)
• Date of Birth (DD/MM/YYYY) - Solar Calendar (Western Calendar)
• Hour of Birth (This is not required but can provide additional accuracy)

Calendar Formats Used

Whether a Lunar Calendar or Xia Calendar is used there are basically not much difference when the Lunar Months and Xia Months are the same. However, when there is a difference, the Xia month is often one month off. This means that it does not see certain dates found in the Lunar. 

This concept is called the Blind Days or Gray periods. Blind Days are dates which Xia month cannot see when the moon is, but based on the seasons which is as similar to the Solar Calendar where there is fix periods of months. The Lunar Calendar on the other hand follows the revolution of the moon around the earth.

1. Lunar Calendar - Lunar Calendar is based on the Moon revolution around the earth. 
2. Xia Calendar - Xia Calendar is based on Seasons which is normally fixed on the 3-6 day of each Solar month.

We found the Lunar Calendar to be more accurate from our many research and tests done for those people in the Blind Days or Gray Periods. Thus is used as the base calculation for the reports by Geomancy.Net especially when doing calculations for people found between these Gray periods.

Pillars of Destiny Charts

The Pillars of Destiny has to be calculated from the Chinese Calendar and not the Solar Calendar (Western Calendar).

From each of the year, month, day, hour, a heavenly stem and earthly branches are determined. Thus, forming 8 different characters (or 6 characters if hour is missing). This was originally how the the name of this Tool was derived Eight Characters (Ba Zi).

What is a Pillar?

Year	This is an example of a Year Pillar, comprising of yi-wei. The character on the top is the heavenly stem The character on the bottom is the earthly branches
yi yin Wood
wei yin Earth

1. Heavenly Stem

This comprises of 10 different unique characters and is considered the heavenly spirit of the pillar.

2. Earthly Branches

This comprises of 12 different unique character and is considered the earthly spirit of the pillar.

How does a Pillars of Destiny Chart looks like?

It looks the following with 4 pillars, hour, day, month, year. Normally in Chinese we read it from the Right to Left. Thus, the first pillar is the year pillar which is on the right most column.

	4th Pillar	3rd Pillar	2nd Pillar	1st Pillar
	Hour	Day	Month	Year
Heavenly Stem Elements	bing yang Fire	ren yang Water	bing yang Fire	yi yin Wood
Earthly Branches Elements	wei yin Earth	shu yang Earth	shu yang Earth	wei yin Earth

 Learn more about True Birth Elements >