The day pillar for Wednesday, 28 July 2027
| Day pillar | 戊申 (wu shen) |
|---|---|
| Heavenly stem | 戊 (wu) |
| Earthly branch | 申 (shen) |
| Day element | Earth 土 (tu) |
| Polarity | Yang |
| Month pillar | 丁未 (ding wei), governed by 小暑 (xiaoshu) |
Today's day pillar is 戊申 (wu shen), a yang Earth day in the sixty-day cycle. The month pillar is 丁未 (ding wei), governed by the term 小暑 (xiaoshu).
戊 (wu), the fifth heavenly stem
戊 is yang Earth: the mountain and the embankment, ground that holds its shape against whatever leans on it.
戊 is the fifth stem and the yang form of Earth. The tradition reads it as high ground, the dyke or the ridge, mass that other things arrange themselves around. Earth in BaZi is not a season of its own so much as the ground the other four elements stand on.
Worth a warning about romanization: the stem 戊 and the branch 午 both come out as wu in pinyin without tone marks, and they are unrelated characters. The pillar 戊午 (wu wu) is a real one, day 55 of the sixty, and reading the characters rather than the letters is the only way to keep them apart.
戊 is also hidden inside 寅 (yin), 巳 (si), 申 (shen) and 辰 (chen), so it turns up in the ground floor of a day even when the visible stem is something else.