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◆ The open library

Nine systems.
One growing library.

The encyclopedia of the divination traditions K A X A N T A reads from — plain-English, source-cited, and free. Start with a system, follow a beginner path, or dive into an essay.

9 ◆ systems
19 ◆ comparisons
115 ◆ glossary terms
4 ◆ beginner paths

The nine systems

◆ Start anywhere · everything cross-links
Human Design
Synthesis · 1987 · Ra Uru Hu

A modern mechanics of type, strategy, and authority — built from I Ching, astrology, Kabbalah, and the chakra system. Answers the question: how do you make clean decisions?

5 types64 gates9 centers
Western Astrology
Hellenistic · ~2nd c. BCE

The tropical zodiac, as it developed through Ptolemy, Bonatti, Lilly, and the 20th-century psychological revival. Maps identity through planets, signs, houses, and aspects.

12 signs10 planets12 houses
Ba Zi
Chinese · Tang-Song · ~10th c.

"Eight characters" — four pillars (year, month, day, hour) expressed through ten stems and twelve branches. The most structural of the Chinese fate systems.

4 pillars10 stems5 elements
Numerology
Pythagorean · 6th c. BCE

A decimal alphabet. Reduces name and birth date to archetypal digits and master numbers, mapping life path, expression, and personal year cycles.

9 core3 master5 cycles
Feng Shui
Chinese · Han — Tang

The study of qi through space. Flying Stars, Eight Mansions, and form schools — computing how a birth date, a compass, and a room plan interact.

8 trigrams9 stars24 mountains
Qi Men Dun Jia
Chinese · Han military origin

The "Strange Gate Hiding" — a time-and-space grid once used by generals to pick winning hours. Best-in-class for when and which direction to act.

9 stars8 gates9 palaces
Xuan Kong Da Gua
Chinese · Qing dynasty refinement

Reads the building, not the person — its axis as a hexagram paired with its exact inverse, judged on the element relationship between them.

8 orientations6 lines24 mountains
Water Formula
Chinese · San He · wealth app.

A specialized external-water application of the San He school — tuning the flow and exit of water relative to the property sitting. The classical Chinese "wealth map."

12 stages4 directions24 mountains
Zi Wei Dou Shu
Chinese · Song · ~10th c.

The "Purple Star" astrology. Places dozens of stars across twelve palaces representing life domains. Where Ba Zi maps structure, Zi Wei maps narrative.

14 majors12 palaces10 da xian

Featured · deep reads

◆ Long-form · deep reads

Recently published

◆ New essays · updated weekly
☷ Feng Shui · essay
Ba Zhai, the Eight Mansions: Every Kua, Every Direction, and the Rule Behind the Table
Ba Zhai — the Eight Mansions school — is the part of classical Feng Shui that is about the person rather than the building. It gives everyone one of eight trigrams through the Kua number, and from that trigram it rates all eight compass directions: four that support you and four that work against you, each with a name, a rank and a job. This piece prints the whole system in one place — the Kua-to-trigram table, the eight energies, the complete direction table for every Kua and its reverse lookup — and then shows the one thing almost no English source explains: the line rule that generates every row of that table from the trigram itself, and why it splits the world into an East group and a West group.
14 min · Sep 06Feng Shui
木 Ba Zi · essay
Ba Zi Clashes and Combinations: How the Twelve Branches Meet
The Heavenly Stems in a Ba Zi chart relate to one another through the Ten Gods. The Earthly Branches relate through something older and more geometric: six combinations, six clashes, six harms, four penalty groups and four three-harmony triads, laid out as fixed patterns on the twelve-branch wheel. They are how a chart holds together, and they are how a year, a month or a day reaches into it. This piece prints every table, shows how each set is derived from the wheel rather than memorised — the harms fall out of the combinations and the clashes, the triads out of the life cycle of an element — and closes with a single twelve-row table that gives every branch its partners at a glance.
14 min · Sep 06Ba Zi
紫 Zi Wei · essay
How a Zi Wei Dou Shu Chart Is Calculated, Step by Step
Every Zi Wei Dou Shu chart is built the same way, in the same order: convert the birth date to the lunar calendar, locate the Ming Palace from the month and the hour, derive the Five Elements Bureau, place the Zi Wei star from the lunar day, and let the other thirteen major stars fall into fixed positions around it. None of the steps is difficult, but every one of them is a lookup most apps hide. This piece walks all five with the classical tables printed in full — including the 150-cell table that places Zi Wei for every lunar day in every bureau — and builds one real chart from birth data to a finished twelve-palace layout.
18 min · Sep 06Zi Wei
木 Ba Zi · essay
The Ten Gods: How a Ba Zi Chart Becomes a Reading
The Ten Gods are the layer that turns a Ba Zi chart from eight characters into a reading. Every other character in the chart is measured against one reference point — the Day Master — and the relationship is decided by two questions with five and two answers: which of the five element relations holds, and do the polarities match. Five times two is ten, which is why there are exactly ten gods and never an eleventh. This piece derives the whole table from those two questions, works a full example, and explains the two structural details most introductions leave out: why the Day stem never appears in its own list, and why hidden stems count for less.
10 min · Aug 23Ba Zi
卦 Xuan Kong · essay
The House Sits on a Hexagram
Most Feng Shui schools ask which direction a house faces. Xuan Kong Da Gua asks which hexagram it sits on — and then which hexagram it faces, which is always the exact inverse of the first. This piece works through the mechanism with a real computed example: a house sitting north and facing south, the most conventional orientation in Chinese practice, produces hexagram 63 under hexagram 64 and rates as Challenging rather than ideal. The full five-rating table, the eight orientations our reading resolves to, and why turning the house around makes the reading worse rather than better.
10 min · Aug 23Xuan Kong
紫 Zi Wei · essay
The Four Transformations: Zi Wei Dou Shu's Moving Parts
A Zi Wei Dou Shu chart is a still photograph until the Four Transformations arrive. Si Hua (四化) takes a single Heavenly Stem and hands exactly four stars a job: Hua Lu opens flow, Hua Quan grants force, Hua Ke confers reputation, and Hua Ji binds. This piece gives the complete ten-stem table computed from our engine, the three major stars that never receive a transformation under any stem, and the reason the same mechanism runs three separate clocks — birth, decade, and year — from three different stems.
9 min · Aug 23Zi Wei