Earth

Meaning

Earth is the phase of the centre: the ground everything stands on, the field that takes the seed and gives back the harvest, the pause between one season and the next. “The Great Plan” says that earth is sown and reaped, and the tradition reads in it what holds, nourishes and gathers: steadiness, care, patience, a place others can lean on and come back to.

It stands apart from the other four. They follow each other round the year, rising as yang and gathering as yin; Earth is the pivot they turn on, the turning point at the end of each season as much as the centre of the compass. In the generating cycle Fire feeds it, leaving ash that becomes soil, and it feeds Metal, which it bears in its veins; it checks Water, holding it within banks and dams; and Wood checks it, its roots breaking up and loosening the soil.

Its gifts, as the tradition gives them, are reliability, practicality, loyalty and the gift of making things grow, and its virtue in the Confucian scheme is good faith (信 xìn), the trust that keeps people together. Much of it is read as heaviness and worry, a ground that will not move; little of it as a centre still to be built. The tradition answers with balance: movement and change for a heavy Earth, routines and a home base for a light one.

In practice

• In BaZi, two stems are Earth: Wu, yang Earth, the mountain unmoved by passing weather, and Ji, yin Earth, the field and the garden soil. Four branches are Earth, one closing each season: Chen the Dragon, Wei the Goat, Xu the Dog and Chou the Ox. Each keeps a little of another phase among its hidden stems, which is why the tradition calls them the four storehouses: Chen keeps Water, Wei Wood, Xu Fire and Chou Metal.
• In Chinese astrology, the Dragon, the Goat, the Dog and the Ox are Earth animals by their branch. The years 2028 and 2029 are Earth years, the Earth Monkey’s and the Earth Rooster’s; the next pair is 2038 and 2039, the Earth Horse’s and the Earth Goat’s.
• In Feng Shui, the centre, the north-east and the south-west are Earth, with the trigrams Gen, the mountain, and Kun, the receptive earth; so are three of the nine stars, 2 Black, the star of land and of patient care, 5 Yellow, the emperor’s star and the strongest of the nine, which the classics handle with the most care when it passes through a home, and 8 White, the star of stillness and savings, which reigned over Period 8, from 2004 to 2023.
• With little Earth, the tradition suggests routines, a home base and time given to the people near you; with much of it, movement and something new.

Across traditions

• Western astrology has an element of earth, cold and dry, shared by Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn: a temperament of the practical and the lasting, close in spirit to the Chinese Earth, though the West sets it in a ring of four rather than at the centre of five.
• Chinese astronomy calls Saturn the Earth star, 土星 tǔxīng, and once called it the Guardian Star, 鎮星 zhènxīng, for its slow, steady march; the West, by its own road, gave Saturn the earth sign Capricorn to rule.
• The centre holds a place of its own in many cosmologies, the navel of the world at Delphi among them; in the Chinese scheme it belongs to Earth, and so does the colour of the emperor.

Origin and history

The character 土 shows a mound of earth standing on the ground, and is already written so on the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty. The monthly ordinances of the Lüshi Chunqiu (c. 239 BC) give Earth the centre and the heart of the year, between summer and autumn; the Huainanzi (139 BC) names its ruler the Yellow Emperor and its emblem the Yellow Dragon. Later schemes, the one BaZi uses among them, gave Earth instead the last eighteen days or so of every season, the months of its four branches. Yellow, Earth’s colour, became the emperor’s own: from the Tang dynasty onwards, only he wore it. BaZi’s classics give the Earth stems their images: in the Di Tian Sui, Wu is solid and steady, holding the centre, and Ji is the moist, fertile soil that keeps and grows.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads Earth in the stems Wu and Ji and in the four branches Chen, Wei, Xu and Chou, in a pillar or hidden in another branch: Yin, Si and Shen hold Wu among their hidden stems, Wu, the Horse’s branch, holds Ji. In BaZi’s balance Earth is read as much of it from about 2.5 of the nine points, little under half a point. In Feng Shui the centre, the north-east and the south-west palaces and the stars 2, 5 and 8 are Earth. Ulune draws Earth in ochre.

Correspondences