Shen Sha (Special Stars)

Shen Sha are markers you look up from the stems and branches of your chart, and each one follows a fixed rule. Your chart has four pillars, one each for the year, month, day and hour of your birth. Each pillar has a Heavenly Stem on top and an Earthly Branch below.

The stem of your day pillar is called the day stem, and it is also your Day Master. The branch of your year pillar is the year branch, and the rest are named the same way.

Each star starts from one character in your chart and points to another. If that second character appears in your four pillars, you have the star. For example, a Jia day stem points Heavenly Noble to the Chou and Wei branches, so a Chou or Wei anywhere in your branches means you have it.

Get your Four Pillars from the free BaZi calculator, then check them against the lookup tables to see which Shen Sha you have.

First find which character a star is looked up from, then find where it lands in the matching table.

Looked up by stem

Check Heavenly Noble and Academic Star twice, once with your day stem and once with your year stem. A match from either one counts.

Looked up by triad

The twelve branches form four groups of three, called triads. Yin, Wu and Xu, for example, make one group. Find the group your day or year branch belongs to, then read across that row.

Looked up by month or year branch

Heavenly Virtue sometimes lands on a stem and sometimes on a branch.

Kui Gang and Void

You have Kui Gang if your day pillar is Ren Chen, Geng Xu, Geng Chen or Wu Xu.

Void depends on which group of ten your day pillar falls in. The sixty stem and branch pairs run in groups of ten, and each group leaves two branches without a stem. Those two branches are the Void.

Shen Sha are not the foundation of a reading; they only back it up. A BaZi reading starts with the five elements, the Ten Gods and Day Master strength. A star only adds weight when it points the same way as the rest of the chart.

Say your chart already shows plenty of help from other people. A Heavenly Noble makes that tendency clearer. A Robbery Star or a Yang Blade, on the other hand, does not mean something bad will happen.

Older books list well over a hundred of these stars, and Fortune Cloud calculates only the nineteen in common use.

The common stars fall into four groups: help, study, movement and love.

• HelpHeavenly Noble, Heavenly Virtue and Monthly Virtue. Other people are more likely to lend a hand, but your own effort still counts.
• StudyAcademic Star and Canopy. Both relate to learning and reflection.
• MovementSky Horse and General Star. The first is about changes of place, the second about your standing in a group.
• LovePeach Blossom, Red Phoenix and Heavenly Joy. Peach Blossom leans toward popularity, the other two toward romance, marriage and happy events.

When a Major Cycle or a year brings one of your stars, it only hints at a theme for that stretch of time. A Major Cycle (Da Yun) is a ten-year period of luck, and an Annual Fortune (Liu Nian) is the luck of a single year. The lookup still starts from your own four pillars.

For example, a Zi day branch belongs to the Shen, Zi and Chen group, so its Sky Horse is Yin, the Tiger branch. In a Tiger year, moving house, changing jobs or business travel tend to come up more often.

Whether that is good depends on your chart's needs. If the Tiger branch's element is one of your favorable elements, the change is more likely to bring opportunity. If it is unfavorable, it is more likely to mean running around for little gain.