What the Earth 5 · Empty Palace type is like
Good land grows rice when you plant rice and flowers when you plant flowers. An Earth 5 empty-palace type is the same: put them in any setting and they grow into what that setting needs, and grow firmly.
Empty Palace meets the Earth 5 Bureau
An empty palace has no main star, so a reading borrows the stars of the opposite palace; that star is not in the Life Palace, and its brightness is the opposite palace's. The most distinctive thing about an Earth 5 empty palace is that all twelve borrowed combinations are almost equally common, each between about 7.5% and 8.5%, as evenly spread as in Fire 6. In other words, an Earth 5 empty palace might borrow any of the base temperaments. Earth is the element that bears weight. Borrow Tian Liang and it is earth with earth, at ease together; borrow watery stars such as Tai Yin, Ju Men or Tian Tong, and Earth holds back Water, the bureau gathering the borrowed water into a pond rather than letting it run loose; borrow fiery stars such as Tai Yang or Lian Zhen, and Fire produces Earth, the borrowed warmth feeding the land in return. The Life Palace most often falls in Wei or You, close to 19% each.
Work and money
Their strength is growing steadily: moved to a new setting, they do not turn into someone else overnight but gradually grow the shape that suits it, and once grown, it holds. Many long-haul roles suit them: local businesses, community work, sales with very long client relationships, family firms. Their income often depends on staying put; the longer they are somewhere, the richer the return, and moving on too fast is a waste.
Love and getting along
In love their commitment puts down roots slowly. At first it may not look passionate, but a year or two on they have taken the partner's rhythms, family, friends, likes and habits into their own days. They need a partner willing to give it time, and they should remember to turn the soil now and then, taking the other person somewhere neither has been, so the ground does not harden.
When things get stuck
Land that will grow anything soon gets planted full. People hand them things, and they can take them all on and do them well, until no patch of their ground holds anything they chose to plant. Each year they can keep a plot for themselves: something learned just for them, time that is theirs alone, a crop they plant purely because they love it.
The rhythm of the 10-year periods
Empty-palace types have something unusual about their life periods: when a period reaches a palace with main stars, those stars often become the lead characters of that decade. Earth 5 sets out from the Life Palace at age 5 (counted the traditional way), growing up through the first decade on the borrowed stars opposite; after the changes at 15, 25 and 35, each palace's main stars are like a new crop sown in this land. Looking at which stars each period meets on your own chart gives a fair idea of which version of you that decade will grow.
For the full picture of this persona, see Empty Palace · The Traveler.
Where it comes from in Purple Star Astrology
In this type the Life Palace has no main star. That is called an Empty Palace, read by borrowing the stars of the opposite palace; Xingge calls this persona the Traveler.
The bureau is the Earth 5 Bureau. The Five Elements Bureau comes from the Nayin of your Life Palace stem and branch; it places the Zi Wei star on the chart and sets the age your first 10-year period starts, which is 5 for this bureau. No bureau is better than another; Xingge reads it as a flavour of the same persona.
Across 8,762 charts of this type:
- Life Palace branch
- Wei 18.7%, You 18.6%, Shen 14.4%, Yin 10.1%, Chou 6.8%, Mao 6.8%
- Life Palace stars
- borrows Tian Tong + Ju Men 8.5%, borrows Tai Yang + Tai Yin 8.5%, borrows Wu Qu + Tan Lang 8.5%, borrows Tian Tong + Tai Yin 8.5%, borrows Tai Yang + Ju Men 8.4%, borrows Tian Ji + Tian Liang 8.4%
What is the Five Elements Bureau ›Find my bureau ›Empty Palace ›
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Empty Palace in the other bureaus
Other personas in the Earth 5 Bureau
Famous people of the Empty Palace persona
FAQ
Can an Earth 5 empty palace have the Ming Zhu Chu Hai (Bright Pearl Rising from the Sea) pattern?
It can. On a Xingge chart the pattern means the Life Palace is in Wei with no main star, while Tai Yang in Mao and Tai Yin in Hai shine on it from afar; in such charts the opposite palace, Chou, holds Tian Tong and Ju Men, so it is the group with the Life Palace in Wei borrowing Tian Tong and Ju Men. The chart's note says: not necessarily the first to shine, but brighter the further you go. This type has a fairly high share of Life Palaces in Wei, and whether the pattern applies shows under patterns once the chart is drawn.
How do the old books view a Life Palace with no main star?
When grading charts, the Essentials of Reading the Stars in the third volume says: “If there is no lucky main star, but the three palaces have lucky stars, it is a chart of the next grade down within the upper grade.” In other words, with no main star in the Life Palace but lucky stars shining in from the trine, the ancients still placed the chart in the upper tier, one step down. The key is the trine: reading an empty palace means looking not only at the stars borrowed from opposite but at whether good stars shine in from the Wealth and Career Palaces. The old text is weighing the whole layout, not calling an empty palace worse.
How common is the Earth 5 · Empty Palace type?
Out of 262,980 charts cast for every day and every two-hour period from 1950–2009, 8,762 have Empty Palace leading the Life Palace and the Earth 5 Bureau: about 3.3%, roughly 1 in 30 people. Every day and hour is counted equally, so this is not the actual birth distribution of a population.
Why can two people born on the same day be different types?
Where your Life Palace falls depends on your birth month and birth hour, and your Five Elements Bureau comes from the stem and branch of that palace. So on the same day, one two-hour period later moves the Life Palace by one, and the main star and bureau can both change. The twelve hours of a single day usually produce several different types.
What is the Five Elements Bureau?
The Five Elements Bureau is the Nayin element of your Life Palace stem and branch: Water 2, Wood 3, Metal 4, Earth 5 or Fire 6. The number places the Zi Wei star on the chart and is also the age your first 10-year period begins (2 for Water, 6 for Fire). A bigger number is not better or worse; Xingge reads the element as a flavour of the same persona.
How is this different from MBTI?
MBTI comes from a questionnaire about how you see yourself. An Xingge type comes from your birth date and time, with nothing to answer, and the same birth details always give the same type. They work well side by side: MBTI describes your current habits, the chart describes your underlying nature and the rhythm of your life.
Which type do I get if my Life Palace has two main stars?
When two main stars share the Life Palace, the one listed first (in the order of the Zi Wei and Tian Fu star groups) sets the persona, the same as on your chart page. A Life Palace with no main star is the Empty Palace: the Traveler.
A type looks only at the Life Palace and the bureau: the roughest outline of a chart. People of the same type differ in the Body Palace, the surrounding palaces and the transformations.