Conception stage

Meaning

Conception is the eleventh of the twelve life stages, after the Pause. A new cycle begins here, but it does not show yet: the phase is a seed again, held in the ground through the cold months. The classics call the stage 胎 tāi, “the embryo”, and the Ziping Zhenquan explains it as the next qi taking over and gathering into a new life. After the stages of withdrawal comes the first of return.

The tradition reads ideas in the making, plans and quiet potential. A Day Master at its Conception stage in a pillar’s branch carries there something not yet born: a project still in thought, a gift not yet used, an interest that will take time to come into the open. What the stage holds is real, but young, and it grows by being looked after rather than by being shown.

Its difficulty is the plan that stays a plan, or a beginning judged too early by what it cannot yet do. The tradition values patience with what is forming, the shelter that comes next, Nurture, and the knowledge that every Birth began here.

In practice

• For each Day Master: Jia is conceived in You, Bing and Wu in Zi, Geng in Mao and Ren in Wu; Yi in Shen, Ding and Ji in Hai, Xin in Yin and Gui in Si.
• Opposite the height: Conception stands across the wheel from the Peak, in the branch that clashes with it, You against Jia’s Mao, Zi against Bing’s Wu: the seed faces the full growth, and each is in the other.
• The middle of the seasons: the yang stems are conceived in Zi, Mao, Wu and You, the branches at the heart of the seasons, as the year’s turning points prepare the next; the yin stems in Yin, Si, Shen and Hai.
• Before and after: Conception follows the Pause and leads to Nurture, then to Birth.
• On the board and in time, the stage shows under each pillar whose branch is the Day Master’s Conception branch, and in the full table in the row of a luck pillar or a year that brings it.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the stage is tai, tae and Thai.
• In BaZi itself some books add a fifth pillar for the month of conception, the 胎元 tāiyuán, counted from the birth’s month pillar one stem and three branches on, as if the chart had a seed of its own; Ulune reads the four pillars and leaves it out.
• In Hellenistic astrology the conception had its chart too: the new or full moon before the birth, the prenatal syzygy, which Vettius Valens and his contemporaries read beside the birth chart, and later the rule called the Trutine of Hermes, which tried to find the moment of conception from the birth.

Origin and history

Conception belongs to the twelve stages that the Zi Ping school set out for the ten stems, in the Yuanhai Ziping of the Song and the San Ming Tong Hui of the Ming, the last two of which, the embryo and the nourishing, lead the cycle back to its Birth. The Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, explains it as the qi that follows the Pause gathering into an embryo, and closes its account of the twelve by saying that from Nurture the cycle returns to its Birth, round and round without end.

How Ulune calculates it

Conception is stage 10 of the count, ten branches from the Birth, which is the same as two branches before it: forward for a yang stem, so Jia, born in Hai, is conceived in You; backward for a yin stem, so Yi, born in Wu, is conceived in Shen. Earth follows Fire, Wu conceived in Zi with Bing and Ji in Hai with Ding. Since the Peak is stage 4, six branches away, the two always clash. The board shows the stage under each pillar whose branch it is, and the full table in the luck pillar and the year too.

Correspondences