A screenshot arrives on WeChat. Eight characters laid out in two neat rows by one of the free apps, and underneath it: Master, can you look at when I’ll make money?
Sometimes it’s a parent’s chart instead, with a note saying she hasn’t been well lately, can you see whether she gets through this. I don’t answer those. Reason further down.
Ten years of practice in Sydney, and the sentence I say most often during a consultation is “I can’t see that.”
The one character that matters
The stem sitting on the day pillar is called the day master. That one stands for you, and the other seven characters are what happens to it: what holds it up, what pushes against it, what drains it. Stems and branches themselves are an old Chinese system for numbering time, no more mystical than counting one, two, three, and reading a chart is mostly bookkeeping about which of the eight is doing what to which. That is also what fixes the scale the method works at.
What it reads
Temperament. Whether a person moves fast. Whether they can be talked round, and how long it takes. Some people won’t take a step until they can see the whole road; others start walking and find out. This is the steadiest layer, because a chart describes how somebody is assembled, and how somebody is assembled doesn’t wait for events to become true. What comes out is a tendency. A quick person can be quick and effective or quick and destructive; the chart covers the first half of that sentence, and the second half is up to him.
Where the five phases sit. How evenly wood, fire, earth, metal and water are spread across the eight characters. Some charts are all wood and fire, dry and hot. Others are stacked with metal and water, cold. When the imbalance is severe, a person tends to fall over the same obstacle repeatedly. The remedies land in ordinary places: what kind of work, which side of the room to sleep on, what time of day to do the one thing that matters most. Not a bracelet purchase. I don’t sell consecrated objects.
Timing, meaning the ten-year luck pillars and the annual cycles. This is the part I find most useful. Life doesn’t run at an even pace: there are years when everything you push moves, and years when the same effort leaves you where you started, and a chart shows the broad shape of that.
What kind of work suits you. This one gets misread constantly. A chart cannot tell you “you should go into finance.” It has no such vocabulary. What it has is: outward or inward, front-of-house or back-of-house, long relationships or one transaction at a time, and how much unresolved outcome you can carry.
The questions I get from the Chinese community here come down to the same handful. Should I get a real estate agent’s licence. Should I take over a café. Should I retrain into nursing. Those three want completely different people. Agency work will keep putting you in front of strangers with no guarantee that anything closes. A café is physical stamina plus watching the cash flow every day, for years, without getting bored of it. Nursing runs on procedure, and on not minding that it does. At that level a chart has something to say. Which of them pays better, ask an accountant.
What it doesn’t read
Specific events. The day of an accident, when the redundancy comes, the six numbers. Somebody asks me the last one in complete seriousness most years, and every year I say I don’t know. I read to the year, sometimes the month, and below that I don’t trust my own precision. There are practitioners who read down to the individual day. I can’t do it, and nobody has yet talked me into believing they can. One particular decision and when it resolves is a divination question, a different instrument.
Other people. Charts of spouses and business partners arrive with “tell me whether this person is trustworthy.”
I don’t read those.
Life and death. I’ve never made a pronouncement about whether somebody lives, and I don’t intend to start. Part of it is that I can’t. The other part is that in Australia, telling a paying client something like that is the kind of claim you can be made to answer for.
The birth hour is the hard part
More consultations stall here than anywhere else.
Older clients born in mainland China usually have nothing but a parent’s memory: just before dawn, not long after dinner, my mother says it was afternoon. Any one of those can span two of the traditional double-hours.
People born here are better off, since the hospital record generally has a clock time on it. But the first question is which state. New South Wales and Victoria run daylight saving. Queensland doesn’t; it trialled it for three summers around the turn of the nineties and voted it down. Western Australia trialled it too, 2006 to 2009, and voted it down as well. Even for Sydney the dates move: first Sunday in October to first Sunday in April only starts in 2008, before that it ran from the last Sunday in October to the last Sunday in March, and in the Olympic year it began in late August. That table is the fiddliest thing in my own chart software and the part I most often get wrong. The free apps don’t go near any of it. They’ll cheerfully print out the hidden stems in every branch, in more detail than I bother with, and never once ask whether the hour going in is right.
Then true solar time. All of China runs on one clock set to Beijing, so someone born in Xinjiang can be more than two hours out if you take the wall clock at face value, which is a whole double-hour and then some. Australia is milder. Sydney sits a bit over a degree off the meridian that Eastern Standard Time is built on, which is under five minutes of longitude correction. But true solar time also carries the equation of time, which swings between about fourteen minutes behind and sixteen minutes ahead over the course of a year, so in early November the two together come to twenty minutes. Most of the time that doesn’t change the reading. On a birth sitting near a boundary you do the arithmetic properly. Perth is four degrees off its meridian, sixteen and a half minutes on longitude alone.
What goes wrong when the hour is wrong. Mildly, the hour pillar is simply the wrong pillar, and since it carries the later years and the children’s palace, those readings are void. Badly, the day master flips from strong to weak, the useful element changes with it, and the entire chart gets read backwards.
So with an uncertain hour I cast two or three candidates and test them against things that have already happened and have dates on them: a marriage, a move between countries, a death in the family, the year the money went badly wrong. Four or five of those and usually one candidate fits noticeably better than the rest.
Sometimes none of them separates. Every candidate explains the same events equally well, which tells you those events were never governed by the hour pillar to begin with, and the reverse-engineering has nothing to grip. Then I say so: the hour can’t be fixed, everything depending on the hour pillar is out, and we work with what’s left.
I know practitioners who handle it differently. They read it anyway, on the grounds that the client has no way to check. I can’t work like that.
There’s a related question I’ve never settled to my own satisfaction. The zi hour straddles midnight, and schools disagree about whether the eleven-to-twelve half belongs to the day that’s ending or the day beginning. I cast it the way I was taught. I can’t refute the argument on the other side either, so I don’t claim to be right. When somebody was born in that window I cast both and take a look, and if the two charts diverge much, I tell them.
What I don’t do
No supernatural claims. No pronouncements on death or disaster. Anything involving illness goes to a doctor, anything legal to a lawyer, anything about investment or a business decision to a licensed accountant or adviser. What I offer from a chart is tendency and timing, which are the two things it genuinely produces.
Some people hear that boundary and decide there’s nothing left worth having. I don’t see it that way. Knowing that the stretch you’re standing in is a contracting one is enough to keep you from handing in your notice and buying a café in the middle of it.