Starpath · Reading a chart
How your palaces are placed
Your birth month and hour decide where your Life palace sits; the other palaces follow in order.
Start at the 寅 cell and call it the first lunar month. Count forward one cell per month until you reach your birth month. From there, count backward one cell per two-hour period, starting with 子 (11 pm to 1 am), until you reach your birth hour. That cell is your Life palace.
Count forward instead of backward for the hour and you reach your Body palace (身宫), a second marker that shares a cell with one of the twelve palaces.
The other eleven palaces then follow in their fixed order. This is why two people with the same birthday but different birth hours can have very different charts.
Go deeper
The Life palace also receives a heavenly stem, worked out from your birth year’s stem. Its stem and branch together give your bureau: water 2, wood 3, metal 4, earth 5 or fire 6. The bureau and your lunar birth day place the star Zi Wei, and the other principal stars follow from Zi Wei in fixed patterns.
The Body palace is often read as how you grow through experience, especially later in life. It can only share a cell with the Life, Spouse, Wealth, Travel, Career or Wellbeing palace.