Fire of the thunderbolt

Meaning

Fire of the thunderbolt is the lightning that splits a winter sky, fire born from water and storm. The tradition reads sudden brilliance and force, an energy that is striking when it comes and does well to be channelled.

It is the Na Yin of two pillars that follow each other, Wu Zi and Ji Chou, the 13th of the thirty: a sound of Fire. The Na Yin gives each two pillars of the sixty-cycle an image and a phase, heard beside their stems and branches.

Fire sounds in six of the thirty: besides this one, Fire in the furnace, Fire on the mountain top, Fire at the foot of the mountain, Fire of the lamp and Fire in the sky.

In practice

• Its two pillars, Wu Zi, the Yang Earth Rat, and Ji Chou, the Yin Earth Ox: a Fire sound for two Earth stems, the Na Yin being a layer of its own beside the stem and the branch.
• On BaZi’s board, each pillar shows its Na Yin under its column, and its reading says what its phase is to the Day Master: the Correspondences below give it for all five phases.
• Its years, two in a row, each from Lichun: 1828–1829, 1888–1889, 1948–1949, 2008–2009, 2068–2069, 2128–2129 and 2188–2189, in the 1800–2200 table.
• In the zodiac’s table, each of the four places, the year, the month, the day and the hour, gives the Na Yin of its pillar.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads a pillar’s Na Yin from the classical table of thirty (names.ts), one for each two pillars in the cycle’s order: this one for the 25th and the 26th, Wu Zi and Ji Chou. The tradition draws its phase from the numbers of its four characters: for 戊子 and 己丑, 5 + 9 + 9 + 8 = 31; 49 − 31 = 18, whose 8 gives Wood, and Wood produces Fire, the Na Yin’s phase.

Correspondences