Luck Pillars
Your Luck Pillar timeline
Ten-year periods, running forward or backward through the sexagenary cycle depending on your year pillar and your sex, starting at an age measured from your birth to the neighbouring solar term. Which decade you are in, and what each one is.
Why they start at an odd age
Luck Pillars do not begin at birth or at a round number. The starting age is the distance from your birth moment to the neighbouring solar term, converted at three days to the year — so it lands at seven years and four months, or two years and ten months, and it is different for everyone.
The direction depends on two things together: whether your year stem is yang or yin, and your sex. That is why two people born the same day can have pillars running opposite ways through the cycle, and why this page will not compute them without both facts.
The decade outranks the year
In practice a practitioner reads the Luck Pillar first and the annual pillar second, because one lasts ten years and the other lasts one. A difficult year inside a supportive decade is not the same event as the same year inside an unsupportive one.
Which is the argument for looking at the timeline before looking at the forecast — it is the ground everything else is read against.