Monthly pillar

Meaning

The monthly pillar, 流月 liúyuè, “the flowing month”, is the pillar of a solar month as it passes: twelve to a year, each opened by one of the twelve terms that start a month, from Lichun in early February to Xiaohan in early January. Like the annual pillar, it is the same for everyone and is read against one birth chart at a time.

Each month brings a stem and a branch for about thirty days. Ulune reads them as it reads a year’s: the stem as one of the Ten Gods for the Day Master, the branch by its main qi’s god, and the meetings of both with the four pillars. A month of the Eating God inside a year of the Direct Officer, for instance, is a lighter, freer stretch in a year of duties.

The month is the smallest season the tradition reads in a chart’s time: the luck pillar sets the decade, the year its weather, the month the weeks within it. Each is a nuance inside the one above, never a forecast on its own.

In practice

• In the Cycles lens, the year shown lists its twelve months, each with its dates, its gods and what it meets; each opens its reading.
• The months of 2026, from Lichun: Geng-Yin, Xin-Mao, Ren-Chen, Gui-Si, Jia-Wu, Yi-Wei, Bing-Shen, Ding-You, Wu-Xu, Ji-Hai, Geng-Zi, and Xin-Chou from Xiaohan in January 2027.
• Their stems follow the year’s by the rule of the five tigers: a Bing year, like 2026, opens with Geng-Yin, as every Bing or Xin year does.
• Their branches are always the same in the same season: Yin from Lichun, Mao from Jingzhe, and so round to Chou from Xiaohan.
• In the table, the year and its months form a part of their own, with Copy and CSV.
• A month inside its year: a month’s reading names what it meets among the four pillars, and the year’s reading what the year meets in its luck pillar, so that a month can be read inside its year and its decade, the way the tradition reads it.

Across traditions

• In Korea the month’s pillar is the wolun of saju, the month’s luck.
• In Feng Shui each solar month has its own flying-star chart, the monthly stars, read in a home the way the monthly pillar is read in a chart.
• In Western astrology the nearest idea is the Sun’s passage through a sign, about a month, or the lunar return, a chart cast each month for the Moon’s return to its birth place.

Origin and history

The months of the solar calendar are among the oldest of its parts: the Huainanzi, in 139 BC, gives each its branch by the direction of the Dipper’s handle, and the terms fixed them to the Sun. The almanacs named each month’s pillar in the sixty-cycle for centuries before BaZi used them, and the Zi Ping school read the flowing month as the last step of a chart’s time, after the luck pillar and the year. The Song dynasty Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui give the rule of the five tigers that fixes the months’ stems.

How Ulune calculates it

The twelve months of a year run from Lichun to Daxue in that Gregorian year, then from Xiaohan in the January after, each from its opening term, as an instant, to the next. A month’s pillar is its place in the sixty-cycle, counting months unbroken, twelve a year, from Bing-Yin in the Tiger month of 1984, which gives the same pillars as the five tigers. Its gods and meetings are found as for a year.

Correspondences