Purple Star Astrology

Zi Wei Dou Shu (紫微斗数), usually translated Purple Star Astrology, is the second great system of Chinese destiny reading, next to Bazi. It uses the same raw material — the date and hour of birth — but does something very different with it. Bazi turns the birth moment into eight characters and studies how they interact. Zi Wei Dou Shu draws a board of twelve palaces, one for each area of life, and drops more than a hundred named stars into those palaces. Reading the chart means asking which stars landed in which palace. If you have ever looked at a Western birth chart with its twelve houses, the board will look familiar; the way it is filled is not.