The fourteen major stars

How a star, a palace and a brightness fit together

Zi Wei Dou Shu divides a life into twelve palaces, one for each area of it, and places the stars across them from your birth moment. Three things then decide a reading. The star supplies the kind of energy. The palace supplies the subject it acts on. The brightness 廟旺利陷 says how cleanly it comes through where it landed.

So the same star is not the same finding twice. The Vanguard in a career palace and the Vanguard in a relationships palace describe two different lives, and neither is the star on its own.

Why the birth time is not optional here

The palaces are placed from the hour, so without a birth time there is no plate to read. That is the one system on this site with no reduced version: a BaZi or Saju reading can withhold the hour pillar and still say a great deal, and this one cannot start.

Names, and one that is deliberately not a translation

The English name beside each character is the plain archetype the classical text describes, not a literal rendering of the characters. That is a decision, and it changes one name in particular. 七杀 is given here as the Vanguard, because the literal reading is fear-coded and describes the star worse than the archetype does.

Those same two characters also name a ten god in BaZi, where the readings call it Pressure. They are two different things that happen to share a spelling, and every page that uses them says which system it is speaking from.

The fourteen below are the major stars. A chart carries many more minor ones, and the ones this practice declines to surface at all are the malefic minors, for the same reason it declines the literal seven-killings.