Zi Wei Dou Shu, in plain English

Reference

The Twelve Palaces

The twelve areas of life a chart divides into.

A Zi Wei chart is a ring of twelve palaces, each governing one area of life — self, money, partnership, work, home, and so on. Every chart has all twelve; what differs is which stars fall where.

The Fourteen Major Stars

The fourteen characters the system works with.

Fourteen major stars are distributed across the twelve palaces. They are not planets and they do not correspond to anything in the sky — they are positions in a calculated system, derived from the birth date, hour, and true solar time.

The Lucky and Harmful Stars

The layer that decides whether a chart runs clean or runs with friction.

The tradition calls this layer 六吉六煞 — six lucky stars and six harmful ones — and adds two more that are read alongside them, Wealth Store and Sky Horse. The six lucky: Scholar, Eloquence, Left Support, Right Support and the two Noble stars. The six harmful: The Blade, The Spindle, Fire Star, Bell Star, The Void, The Plunder.

The Minor Stars

Thirty-eight small stars that add texture rather than direction.

After the majors and the fourteen that condition them, a chart carries several dozen small stars. They do not change what a palace is about — they change how it feels.

The Four Transformations

The layer that makes a chart move through time.

The four transformations — Prosperity, Power, Renown, Adversity — are what turn a static chart into something that changes. Each heavenly stem assigns the four to four specific stars, and every layer of time (decade, year, month, day, hour) brings its own stem and therefore its own set.