Conception: the first qi after Severance

Receiving the embryo: the first qi in the earth

Conception is the eleventh cell of the twelve life stages, with Severance before it and Nurture after it. The Sanming Tiyao (三命提要), quoted in the Sanming Tonghui (三命通会), writes one entry for each cell, and this is the second, named "receiving the embryo":

Receiving the embryo: heaven and earth's qi meet, mist and haze make things; the thing sprouts in the earth and begins to hold its qi, as a person receives the qi of the parents.

The cell before it, Severance, took its image from a womb with nothing in it yet. Here the empty place receives its first breath: the qi of heaven and earth joins, a seed sprouts in the soil, and the book compares it with a person receiving the qi of father and mother. The name moves from "nothing" to "something has begun", which is the position of Conception in the whole chain: Severance is empty, Conception holds qi, and only later does the thing take shape.

Open the full-size diagram

Landing sketch: positions come from the twelve-stage table of the site engine; Yang Fire and Yang Earth share the Rat, Yin Fire and Yin Earth share the Pig; each pair of arrows joins the Severance and Conception of one pair of stems.

Five pairs of stems: two branches, taken in turns

Set the five Yang and Yin pairs side by side and an orderly pattern appears: within one element, the Yang stem and the Yin stem use the same two branches for Severance and Conception, in opposite order.

The reason is "Yang forward, Yin backward". A Yang stem goes one step forward from Severance and a Yin stem one step backward, so the Severance of the Yang stem is exactly the Conception of the Yin stem of the same element, and the Severance of the Yin stem is the Conception of the Yang stem. Yang Wood is severed at Monkey, and Yin Wood is conceived at Monkey; Yin Wood is severed at Rooster, and Yang Wood is conceived at Rooster. Fire and Earth share one set of branches, which is why ten Day Masters occupy only eight branches.

In the sixty-cycle a Yang stem always pairs with a Yang branch and a Yin stem with a Yin branch, so only six day pillars put the Day Master on its own Conception branch: Bing Zi (丙子), Wu Zi (戊子), Ding Hai (丁亥), Ji Hai (己亥), Ren Wu (壬午) and Gui Si (癸巳). Pairs such as Yang Wood on Rooster or Yin Metal on Tiger do not exist among the sixty pillars. The Conception branch can of course appear in the year, month or hour pillar, and what is looked up is always the Day Master against that branch.

One word, two tables: the stage and the conception origin

Fate books have two things called "conception". One is the cell above: it takes the Day Master as its basis and asks what stage it is in on a given branch. The other is the conception origin (胎元), which takes the birth month pillar as its basis and works out one stem-branch pillar, standing for the month of conception. The Sanming Tonghui (juan 2) takes the second seriously and calls the conception month the "root and sprout of the four pillars".

The usual rule moves the month stem forward one place and the month branch forward three. For a Jia Yin month, Yang Wood moves to Yin Wood and the Tiger moves to the Snake, so the conception origin is Yi Si (乙巳). Counting from the Snake month to the Tiger month, both ends included, gives exactly ten months, the ten months of pregnancy.

The Sanming Tonghui is not content with that rule. Its example is the very chart of a Wu Zi (戊子) year and a Jia Yin month: people of its time often took Yi Si as the embryo straight away, without saying whether a leap month lay inside those ten months. The book argues for another count:

There is only one method: take the three hundred days before birth as the qi of ten months; that is the correct conception.

Three hundred days is exactly five rounds of sixty days, so the day pillar of the conception day equals the day pillar of the birth day; in the book's words, someone born on a Jia Zi day takes Jia Zi as the day of conception. A calendar check on one example: a person born on 20 February 2008 has the pillars Wu Zi year, Jia Yin month and Geng Yin (庚寅) day. Counting back 300 days gives 26 April 2007, and that day is a Geng Yin day too.

So one method hands back a month pillar and the other a date. Whenever the word "conception" turns up in a text, the first question is which of the two is meant.

"Self-conceived gold" in the Na Yin names: Gui Mao

The twelve stages are also applied to Na Yin: the Na Yin element of a pillar is put into the table to see which cell that element itself stands on. Ren Yin and Gui Mao both carry the Na Yin Gold Foil Metal (金箔金). Metal is born at Snake, so Metal is at Severance on Tiger and at Conception on Rabbit. In juan 1 of the Sanming Tonghui Ren Yin is called "gold that severs itself", and for Gui Mao the book cites a work called the Sanming Zuanju (三命纂局):

Gui Mao is gold that conceives itself. If it meets the furnace fire of Bing Yin or Ding Mao it is not counted as a ghost, because conceived gold becomes a vessel in the furnace.

Fire overcomes Metal, so fire is usually Metal's "ghost", the star that overcomes it. This line says that Gui Mao, a piece of gold standing on Conception, is not read that way when it meets the furnace fire of Bing Yin or Ding Mao, and the reason is "conceived gold becomes a vessel in the furnace": Conception is the start of receiving form, the gold has no fixed shape yet, and the furnace turns it into a vessel.

Three questions before reading

1. 1

   Ask for the basis first

   When "conception" appears, decide whether it is the stage in the twelve-stage table or the conception origin worked out from the month pillar. The first asks about the Day Master, the second about the month pillar.

2. 2

   Then ask which element is looked up

   The branches of the year, month, day and hour pillars can all be set against the Day Master; Na Yin is looked up with the Na Yin element itself, and the two methods can give different results.

3. 3

   A stage name is only a position

   Conception is the eleventh cell of the table, not a pregnancy or a birth. Whether a chart has it and how much it weighs is read together with the other pillars.

The cell before is Severance; the cell after is Nurture, which is the third entry of the Sanming Tiyao, "taking shape".