Presiding deities and day paths

What the deity and path mean

An entry reading “Azure Dragon — Yellow path” says that Azure Dragon presides over the day and belongs to the favourable group. “Heavenly Punishment — Black path” gives an unfavourable classification. The path follows from the deity’s identity, so the two fields describe the same assignment rather than two independent judgements.

The Chinese labels are huangdao (黄道), Yellow path, and heidao (黑道), Black path. Here “path” classifies a period of time; it does not give a compass direction. The deity names evoke celestial animals and a heavenly court, with its halls, treasury, officials and punishments. In the almanac, each name has a fixed place in a recurring sequence.

In traditional date selection, this system helps distinguish favourable from unfavourable periods for undertakings such as marriage, moving home or beginning construction. A Yellow-path day supplies a favourable condition, while a Black-path day carries an adverse one. The same method can be used to select a double hour for an action within a day.

The path is a general classification. An activity-specific restriction can still apply on a Yellow-path day, while a Black-path day need not rule out every activity. These labels express traditional judgements, not guarantees about what will happen.

The complete twelve-deity table

A deity’s path stays the same whenever its name returns. Azure Dragon is always Yellow path in this system, for example, and White Tiger is always Black path. What changes from date to date is which member of the sequence presides.

The position numbers begin at zero for the calculations below. They are places in the sequence, not ranks of good or bad fortune.

How the daily and hourly cycles are assigned

The daily assignment

The daily cycle is aligned to the month branch, and the day branch selects a member of that cycle. In a Yin or Shen month, for example, Zi days receive Azure Dragon and Chou days receive Bright Hall. Other month branches shift that starting point.

The reference month follows the Atlas’s solar-term-date convention. It changes at the start of the civil date containing a jie term, one of the twelve solar terms that begin these seasonal months. The calculation does not reset when a numbered lunar month begins.

For the arithmetic, number the branches Zi = 0, Chou = 1, Yin = 2, Mao = 3, Chen = 4, Si = 5, Wu = 6, Wei = 7, Shen = 8, You = 9, Xu = 10 and Hai = 11. Add the month’s offset from the following table to the day-branch number, then keep the remainder after division by twelve. That result selects a position in the deity table.

The hourly assignment

For an hour, use the hour branch in place of the day branch and the day branch in place of the month branch. The same offset table is reused. In the Atlas’s hourly calculation, the day branch advances at 23:00.

An hour’s path can differ from the day’s path because the two assignments use different pairs of inputs. The two Rat portions printed within one civil date can also have different deities. Both have the Zi hour branch, but late Rat uses the following day’s branch to select its offset.

September 11–12, 2026: a worked comparison

September 11, 2026 is Wu-Zi (戊子) and September 12 is Ji-Chou (己丑) in the Ganzhi, or stem-and-branch, cycle. White Dew falls on September 7, so both dates lie in the You solar-term month. You supplies an offset of ten.

Here “mod 12” means the remainder after division by twelve. The separate day-officer calculation subtracts the month branch from the day branch. “Balance” and “Director of Destiny” on September 11 therefore describe different assignments.

The hourly calculation shows how the Rat-hour split works. At 00:30 on September 11, Zi hour combined with the day’s Zi branch gives 0 + 4 = 4: Golden Coffer, Yellow path. At 23:30 on the same civil date, the hour is again Zi, but the day branch used for the hourly calculation has advanced to Chou. Its offset is two, selecting Heavenly Punishment, Black path. That assignment continues through midnight into early Rat on September 12. These clock readings use the Atlas’s UTC+8 reference time.

Other daily influences

Yi and Ji list suitable activities and activities to avoid. Their activity-specific entries come from a separate month-and-day activity table. The path label does not supply those lists.

Auspicious and inauspicious spirits are separate lists that may contain several names. The presiding-deity field chooses one member of the fixed twelve-part sequence. A repeated name in another list does not make the fields interchangeable.

Deity directions assign compass positions to figures such as the Joy, Wealth and Fortune deities. They do not describe the Yellow and Black paths.