About This Blog

In this blog, I present various notes, mainly concerning the Bazi birth charts of celebrities, based on principles I have seen applied by several masters of this divination technique throughout my many years living in Asia. Based on this experience, I have built my experimental model through which I am testing the principles above. The application and testing of this model allow for its improvement.

In the Far East, it is common for English speakers (as a second language) to call the Bazi technique 'Chinese astrology'. People who do this use the word 'astrology' to mean 'divination' or 'fortune telling'. However, in the West, the linguistic root 'astro' has a semantic resonance that refers to the stars (including the planets), which does not correspond to Chinese divination traditions.

In ancient times, the word astrology in Europe meant the science of the stars and, more specifically, the influence they were believed to have on the phenomena of what was then called the 'sublunar world,' that is, the world situated on a plane lower than the sphere of the Moon in ancient cosmology, where we all live and where all the nature that surrounds us exists and lives.

In those more remote times, knowledge of the movement of the stars had no other use than to guess what might happen in our sublunar world (including human lives), based on a kind of induction produced by the movement of the celestial spheres on the world "of generation and corruption" (in the words of Aristotle) ​​where we live. In even earlier times, celestial events, such as solar and lunar eclipses, were seen as messages of divine origin to be interpreted by humanity.

For some time the terms astrology and astronomy coexisted as synonyms, but currently, astronomy is the (conventional) science that studies planets, stars, and other bodies and phenomena beyond our Earth's atmosphere, while the term astrology defines a technique (or 'traditional science') that claims the existence of a correlation between the movements of celestial bodies and events here on planet Earth, its atmosphere, and everything that exists or happens here, including the life of each individual, according to the celestial conjunction at the moment (and place) of their birth. Astrology, however, is not considered a science in the conventional sense of the term.

What is different between Western 'astrology' and the divinatory techniques of the Chinese tradition, such as Bazi, is that, at their base, Chinese traditions do not have the evident metaphysical dichotomy between Heaven, the world of the gods and their messages, on the one hand, and Earth, our contingent world subject to the laws of generation and corruption of the philosopher Aristotle. In my view, Chinese culture believes there is only one world, this one, with its mountains, rivers and seas, stars, storms, calm seas and all living beings. But above all, the Chinese were drawn to the various cycles of nature such as the four seasons of the year, the 12 hours of the day and the various phases of each human life, based on the principles of yin and yang. In other words, we don't need to leave this world we live in to experience miracles – the mere existence of this world is, in itself, an extraordinary miracle, without the need to seek miracles from other worlds! Of course, this is just my personal interpretation, but I believe it's not far from reality.

Returning to the issue of using the expression 'Chinese astrology' as a synonym for divination practice, it suggests a belief in the influence of the stars on people's lives, which, in fact, is practically excluded from the various current Chinese techniques. These are all based on the principles of Yin and Yang in their various and complex variants, without recourse to the movement of the stars, on the assumption that the cycles of nature are, in themselves, sufficiently revealing.

It is true that there was probably, at a certain period in Chinese history, an outline of ‘Chinese astrology’ as a result of the translation into Chinese, from a Persian version, of the work of the Greek astrologer Dorotheus of Sidon (1st century) and even from other sources, namely Indian ones, but this does not seem to have taken hold. What I can say is that, among the current practices known as ‘Chinese astrology’, none of them interprets the alleged influence of the movement of celestial bodies on the unfolding of the lives of human beings, considered individually, based on the moment of their birth. I will return to this subject in due course.

In the GLOSSARY section of the website www.thelifepillars.com I explain the fundamental principles of the Chinese Bazi system.