Five Elements vs. Four Elements: BaZi Fire and Fire Signs Are Not the Same Thing

BaZi has Fire, and astrology has fire signs; BaZi has Water, and astrology has water signs. With names this close, it is natural to wonder whether someone with lots of Fire in BaZi also has lots of fire-sign planets. Our calculations say no. The two "Fires" are sorted by different methods and don't correspond.

Two classifications that only share names

The fundamental difference is how they are sorted. BaZi's Five Elements follow the seasons: the Yin and Mao months are spring and belong to Wood, the Si and Wu months are summer and belong to Fire. Astrology's elements ignore the seasons; the twelve signs simply run Fire, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Earth… in order, so every season contains all four elements.

No fire sign falls in a Fire month

Map the twelve signs onto the BaZi months and the mismatch is plain:

The three fire signs (Aries, Leo, Sagittarius) fall in the Mao–Chen, Wei–Shen and Xu–Hai months, none of them touching the Fire months of Si and Wu, and Sagittarius lies entirely in the Water months of Hai and Zi. Conversely, people born in the Si and Wu months have the Sun in Taurus, Gemini or Cancer, earth, air and water signs, at the very time of year BaZi Fire is strongest.

The numbers: more BaZi Fire, not more fire signs

We drew 2,400 birth moments in Taipei between 1950 and 2010, grouped them by BaZi month, and compared the Fire among the eight BaZi characters with the fire-sign planets among the ten bodies of the chart:

BaZi by lunar.js with the day changing at 23:00, counting the visible element of each stem and branch (hidden stems excluded); the chart counts the element of the sign occupied by each of the ten bodies from the Sun to Pluto. About 200 charts per group; differences in the first decimal place are mostly sampling noise.

The BaZi column is clear: people born in the Si and Wu months average 2.3 Fire characters and those born in the Hai and Zi months only 1.3, because the month itself carries the season's Fire. The chart columns don't follow suit: Si and Wu births average 2.0 fire-sign planets while Hai and Zi births have 2.9. The chart's elements follow the signs of the Sun, Mercury and Venus, and those signs are out of step with the seasonal elements to begin with.

Group it another way and the result is the same: people with three or more Fire characters in BaZi (388 of them) average 2.5 fire-sign planets; people with no BaZi Fire at all (496) average 2.5, against 2.5 overall. How much Fire a BaZi chart has does not predict how many fire-sign planets a birth chart has.

The Day Master and the Sun sign's element don't match either

Another popular conversion is "a Bing Fire Day Master is like a fire sign". The Day Master comes from the day pillar, which steps through the sixty-day cycle and has nothing to do with the Sun's sign:

Same sample. Each Day Master element should be 20% in theory; the variation is sampling noise.

The "five element planets" aren't BaZi's Five Elements

One more source of confusion: in Chinese the five visible planets are named after the Five Elements, Venus as the Metal Star, Jupiter the Wood Star, Mercury the Water Star, Mars the Fire Star and Saturn the Earth Star (their older names were different altogether). But a BaZi chart doesn't use the positions of these planets at all; the Four Pillars look only at the Sun (solar terms, double-hours) and the sixty-day cycle. Mars in a birth chart stands for drive and assertion, which is another matter from BaZi's Fire element.

The Chinese tradition that really does read destiny from the five planets is "Seven Governors and Four Remainders" (Qi Zheng Si Yu), a separate system from both BaZi and Western astrology, which this site doesn't cover.

Can the two element systems be read together?

Side by side, yes; converted, no. BaZi's Five Elements answer "which force is too strong or too weak in this chart, and what would balance it"; see Five Elements analysis and favorable elements. The chart's elements answer "which temperament does this person's style lean toward"; see the element count in the birth chart calculator. When the two say different things, neither is wrong; they are answering different questions.

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