The day pillar for Thursday, 14 January 2027

Day pillar	癸巳 (gui si)
Heavenly stem	癸 (gui)
Earthly branch	巳 (si)
Day element	Water 水 (shui)
Polarity	Yin
Month pillar	辛丑 (xin chou), governed by 小寒 (xiaohan)

Today's day pillar is 癸巳 (gui si), a yin Water day in the sixty-day cycle. The month pillar is 辛丑 (xin chou), governed by the term 小寒 (xiaohan).

巳 (si), the sixth earthly branch

巳 is the snake branch, the start of summer and the late morning, fire that has not yet reached full heat.

巳 is Fire, yin by position, snake by animal. Its hours are 09:00 to 11:00 and its month begins at 立夏 (lixia) in early May.

Here the inside and the outside disagree in an instructive way. 巳 counts as yin by its place in the twelve, but the stem hidden at its core is 丙 (bing), which is yang Fire. Two more hide with it, 庚 (geng, yang Metal) and 戊 (wu, yang Earth). The tradition is comfortable with that, because position and content are simply two different readings.

A 巳 day is a snake day, and pairs such as 丁巳 (ding si), 己巳 (ji si) and 癸巳 (gui si) are how it appears in the sixty.