Earthly Branches

What it is

The twelve earthly branches (地支, ji-ji) are the bottom half of every pillar in a Four Pillars chart, paired with a heavenly stem above them. In order: 子 (ja), 丑 (chuk), 寅 (in), 卯 (myo), 辰 (jin), 巳 (sa), 午 (o), 未 (mi), 申 (sin), 酉 (yu), 戌 (sul), 亥 (hae). The same twelve branches are also the reason the Chinese zodiac has exactly twelve animals — each branch maps to one animal (子 = rat, 丑 = ox, 寅 = tiger, and so on), so a year pillar's branch and that year's zodiac animal are two names for the same underlying twelve-year cycle.

Unlike a stem, a branch does not carry a single simple element — it holds a main element plus one or two "hidden stems" (地支藏干), which is why branch ten-gods in a real chart are read as a small set, not one value.

Worked example

The year branch 寅 (in, tiger) has wood as its primary hidden stem. A day master of Fire would read the wood inside a 寅 year branch as a "resource" influence (wood generates fire) even though the branch's visible label is "tiger," not "wood" — the element comes from what the branch contains, not from the animal name alone.

How Mystica computes it

The free Saju reading computes all four branches from the lunar calendar conversion of your birth date and time, and classifies each branch's hidden-stem ten-gods against your day master — the same table used for the visible stems, applied to what each branch carries underneath.