Birth grid

Meaning

The birth grid sets the digits of the birth date on a square of nine cells, one for each digit from 1 to 9. A digit that appears in the date fills its cell, as many times as it appears. A digit that does not appear leaves its cell empty. Zeros have no cell and are set aside.

Numerology reads the grid as a picture of what is plentiful and what is quiet. Each digit keeps its meaning, from the initiative of 1 to the wide view of 9. A repeated digit is read as a quality lived strongly. A missing digit is read as a quality to be learned along the way, never as a lack.

The lines matter most. Three cells in a row, a column or a diagonal make a line. When all three hold a digit, the line is full. David A. Phillips, after his teacher Hettie Templeton, calls it an arrow: a strength that shows. When all three are empty, the tradition reads a field to develop with care.

In practice

Take a made-up birth date, 15 June 1990. Without the zeros, its digits are 1 1 5 6 9 9. Five digits are missing: 2, 3, 4, 7 and 8.

The diagonal from the bottom left to the top right is full: the line 1-5-9, which Phillips calls the arrow of determination. In the Lo Shu layout the same three digits fill the centre column, read 9-5-1, and the left column, 4-3-8, is empty.

Across traditions

The Lo Shu is the Chinese magic square of three, laid out 4 9 2 / 3 5 7 / 8 1 6. Each of its lines adds up to 15. Feng shui uses it to map the nine palaces of a house or a site. Placing the digits of a birth date on it is a modern practice.

In both layouts, two cells facing each other across the central 5 add up to 10, such as 1 and 9. So the four lines through the centre hold the same digits in both squares: 1-5-9, 3-5-7, 2-5-8 and 4-5-6. Phillips’s two diagonals become the Lo Shu’s centre column and centre row; his middle row and middle column become its diagonals.

The four outer lines differ. Phillips’s rows 3-6-9 and 1-4-7 and columns 1-2-3 and 7-8-9 are not Lo Shu lines; the Lo Shu has 4-9-2, 8-1-6, 4-3-8 and 2-7-6 instead.

Phillips reads his three rows as planes: the mind at the top, the soul in the middle, the body at the bottom. These are not the planes of expression, which come from the letters of the name.

Origin and history

Chinese legend tells of a turtle rising from the Luo river in the time of Yu the Great, its shell marked with the nine numbers. Its first certain written trace is in the Da Dai Liji, a book of rites of the 1st century. The square was identified with the Luoshu diagram in the 12th century.

Europe knew it as Saturn’s table in Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1533). The English translation of 1651 calls it “a square of three”.

Phillips’s grid is modern: he published it in Secrets of the Inner Self (1980), later The Complete Book of Numerology. Books often call it the Pythagorean grid. Phillips himself writes that it is uncertain whether Pythagoras ever used the arrows, and that the surviving fragments of the Pythagorean Philolaus never mention them. The link to Pythagoras is a later attribution.

How Ulune calculates it

• Ulune takes the local date of birth from the chart: day, month and year. It sets the zeros aside, counts each digit from 1 to 9 and lists the missing ones. The name and the birth time play no part.
• It reads eight lines in each layout: three rows, three columns and two diagonals. A line is full when the date holds each of its three digits at least once. It is empty when it holds none, and partial otherwise, shown with a dash. A repeated digit counts once for its line.
• Both layouts are worked out together, and a switch shows one or the other. Authors name the arrows differently, so Ulune names each line by its digits. Phillips’s are in order (1-5-9), the Lo Shu’s as read on the square (9-5-1). In the table, each line’s name links to its entry. The Lo Shu lines 4-9-2, 8-1-6, 4-3-8 and 2-7-6 have none and stay plain.
• On the square, each cell shows its digit as many times as the date holds it. An empty cell shows only its own small number.

Correspondences