My guardian spirit

What this screen reads, and how it settles on a guardian

One thing goes in here: the day you were born. An hour and a birthplace saved in your profile are used if they are there. From that it builds your chart and looks at the day master — the heavenly stem of the day you were born, the element that stands for you. That one thing decides the guardian, and nothing else does.

The right-hand column is not a score; it is the share of people. And every row sits at 20.0% — not roughly, exactly. The 10 heavenly stems carry 2 of each element, so across 10 days each of the 5 guardians comes round 2 times. No guardian here is rare.

The classical Four Symbols (四神獸) are a set of 4, and the one left out of that set is the guardian of the centre — Yellow Dragon (황룡). This screen uses the five-direction set (五方神), which adds that centre, so 5 in all: the day master has 5 elements and 4 seats cannot hold them. Calling this screen's set the Four Symbols would be wrong.

Whether the grain is yang or yin follows from whether that stem is a yang or a yin stem. That split is exact too — yang at 50.0%. 2 grains for each guardian means 10 pairings in all.

What it guards comes from a different axis

The guardian comes from the day master, but what it guards comes from the first element of your favourable element (용신). That value is weighed across all eight characters of the chart, so it does not cycle evenly the way the day master does. Every day anyone could be born on between 1940 and 2019 was run one at a time — 29,220 days.

This axis leans, and visibly. Water and Fire between them take 73.0%, while Earth holds only 5.5%. The table does not hide the low row. This is why two people with the same guardian are told it guards different things.

Multiply the two axes and there are 25 pairings, but only 24 of them actually occur in the sample above. One never does — the centre guardian holding its own seat, that is, Yellow Dragon (황룡), with what it guards being Earth. So this screen states the count rather than drawing a grid with an empty cell in it.

Adding a birth hour adds a pillar and reweighs the chart. Running the same sample against the 12 branches the day is cut into gives 350,640 pairings, and across every one of them the guardian never changed — the day master belongs to the day, not to the hour. What does change is the guarded side, in 11.1% of them.

Sex is neither asked for nor used. Neither is your name, where you live now, or what you do. A birthplace is used only to correct the hour to apparent solar time.

Put in the same birthday and the same hour and you get the same guardian and the same sentences, however many times you press it. There is no draw and no randomness.

These beasts are names the old texts gave to quarters of the sky and to the 5 directions. Tying one to your birth day as a personal guardian is a mirror we built, not something written in those texts. It is not a verdict about good or bad.