Guess what? I’ve been studying bazi for more than a year now! It’s been giving me all of these feelings that I had when I first started studying western astrology. It’s this sheer excitement and also this fascination with the art and the craft. Everything in life starts to feel a bit more magical.
I wanted to write this article playing with examining just Kim Namjoon’s day pillar in bazi not because I feel that I’m so good at it or like I have any expertise to show off yet but because I truly love the art, I am endlessly fascinated with idols, and I wanted to share that with anyone reading this in case you catch the bazi bug too.
Since the day pillar is just a small component of the eight character chart, this also feels like a low stakes way to explore the practice of reading. Keep in mind that an overall description of your chart has a lot more stuff involved than I’m doing here. You have to look at both your chart and your timing and know how to read the balances and imbalances. What I’m doing here is really just for fun.
I’m reading the day pillar of the four pillar chart because the day pillar is usually seen as the pillar that reflects your character. All of the other parts are viewed using the day pillar in bazi.
Finally! The third cow in BTS—Kim Namjoon. I saved Namjoon for last for myself because he’s recently become my second favorite member. Yoongi is my forever favorite so I had to do him first but then I wanted to save my second favorite for last to motivate myself to do all of the writing that this series took.
Namjoon’s day pillar is metal cow or Xin Chou. This means that his day pillar stem is Xin metal or yin metal and his day pillar branch is Chou cow.
Yin metal is refined metal and is most associated with things like precious metals (gold and silver) and jewels. These aren’t the big chunks of rock or boulders that you might use to scale a mountain. These are the little pieces of metal that are hidden away in the earth.
Diamonds form naturally in the earth itself. How it does this is through a combination of high pressure but also water. Namjoon is like this diamond. He forms under conditions of intense pressure.
Let’s take a look at what the ancient scripts of the Di Tiansui say about Xin metal:
辛金软弱，温润而清。
畏土之叠，乐水之盈。
能扶社稷，能救生灵。
热则喜母，寒则喜丁。
The first line of this poem talks about the qualities and characteristics of Xin metal. It’s soft and impressionable. Something like refined gold is actually very soft. It can be shaped into all kinds of different forms.
Namjoon as an artist is incredibly syncretic. Out of everyone in BTS, he talks the most about his influences. He’s a fan of things. He likes to appreciate everything from contemporary art to anime. He allows all of those influences to shape him in one way or another, molding him into his direction and sound. When he releases music too, he works with all kinds of other musicians. He doesn’t like being unformed. He wants older musicians and those with a classical sound to almost make their stamp on him. That’s a huge part of his creativity.
There’s a way in which this aspect of Xin metal, being refined and molded, can also work against itself because it is prone to overthinking but I’ll get into that later.
There’s something that Xin metal fears and this is what the second line discusses. Xin metal doesn’t like to get dirty. It wants to shine. It wants to gleam. It doesn’t want to be wrapped into all of the folds and layers of earth. That suffocates Xin metal and keeps it from shining.
That’s also why Xin metal likes water. The last part of the second line talks about this. Water helps clean off Xin metal and keeps it in a condition where it can sparkle.
It just so happens that Namjoon is a really clean person. This is part of Xin metal. He takes three showers a day. Xin metal is also very different from water which likes to flow downwards into the earth. Xin metal really prefers to come up so that it can sparkle. Namjoon is someone who wants to elevate things. His taste is elevated. He likes contemporary art and literature. This is the curator in Namjoon who wants to pick out all of the best things, the most beautiful things, and put them all together in the same room or concept.
The third line in the poem gives us two uses for Xin metal—it can help us prosper and it can save lives. Let me explain this a bit.
The first part of the third line actually says that it has the ability to support the gods of crops and harvest. This is an economic implication. Gold and silver are actually coins. Coins help support agriculture and harvest because trade and distribution give farmers a motive for growing the things that they grow. This is how metal actually increases the amount of agriculture we do for better or worse.
The second part of the third line references the surgical application of Xin metal. A blade that is fine and precise is used not to end life like a big ax but to save lives. It can cut away gangrene, sew up wounds, and is used to make clothing. This isn’t a blunt instrument. Its use is to improve, to repair, and also to cut away what is rotting. Xin metal possesses the power of discernment. We can also apply this to our reading of Xin metal as the economy. The economy has the power to decide who lives and who dies.
This might show up in how Namjoon maintains relationships. I’m not sure because we’re only privy to small details about their private lives and their dynamics in BTS. As the leader of BTS, I’m sure that Namjoon played a role in deciding who stayed to debut and who didn’t. He’s also able to relegate them into roles and ensure their participation. Sometimes, this is called metal’s controlling nature but it’s not control that’s just about clenching. Sure, metal is compressed and it has a great deal of self control. However, metal also works to control through distribution. Namjoon has the power to assign different things to different people so that they can all work together.
The last line of the poem says that Xin metal likes its mother when it’s warm and that it likes Ding fire when it’s cold. Metal’s mother is earth since metal grows from the earth. If you were born during a warm season, the metal in your chart would seek earth. If you are born during a cold time of the year, your metal would seek warmth in the form of Ding fire.
The time of the year that Namjoon was born in, mid September, is actually quite moderate. You know what? He does seem very close to Jimin who is Ding fire. However, he also seems very close to Yoongi who is earth. However, Namjoon’s relationship with Yoongi and Jimin are different. It’s easier for metal to take earth for granted but work to please fire.
Just like Jimin and Yoongi, Namjoon’s day pillar is Chou cow. As we saw before, the cow worked really hard in the race and almost came in first place. However, it was tricked by the mouse who the cow agreed to give a ride. The mouse jumped in front at the last second. This is why the cow is usually associated with persistence and will come out ahead eventually even when it loses a first battle. The hidden stems of Chou cow Earthly Branch are Gui water, Xin metal, and Ji earth.
Namjoon’s Xin metal is reflected in his day pillar branch. However, that’s actually not the only place it shows up in his whole chart! I know that we're concentrating on his day pillar for this but I think that this is really relevant for reading his character. Namjoon has more Xin metal in his month and year pillars (we don’t know his hour pillar since we don’t know what hour he was born).
When you can find your day pillar stem in a lot of other places in your chart, this is called comparison. Sometimes, this is translated as friend but I feel that a more accurate translation of the Chinese word is comparison. You go places where there are a lot of people who are similar to you. This makes it easy for you to compare yourself with others.
This is what’s going on in Namjoon’s day pillar—he’s a gem buried underneath the earth. This happens because his day pillar branch is earth. As a gem buried under the earth, he’s subjected to a huge amount of pressure and this pressure makes him stronger. Earth’s role in this can also be seen as preparation since earth is metal’s mother. Xin Chou is someone who will prepare and prepare and prepare. In order to write even just one song, Namjoon probably reads fifty books so that he has something to refine and distill into a concise version of his own thoughts.
In that den of preparation, Namjoon isn’t alone. He’s with all kinds of people who are similar to him in some way. There’s going to be both mutual support and rivalry in his life because of this. The rivalry gives him his edge.
I know that Namjoon has often spoken about how his jealousy for other artists and musicians drive him to do better. I wonder if this is actually a painful part of his creative process. On one hand, he’s so inspired and devoted. He wants to go to all of the galleries, listen to all types of music, and just sort the way one might do during a harvest. On the other hand, metal cuts. If Namjoon compares himself to other people in his industry, he’s also subjected to the lookism and judgments of an industrialized idol culture. This is the thing that I was trying to get at before. Xin metal, because it cares so much about refinement, can be rather self critical. I wonder if Namjoon feels that way ever.
Namjoon is impressionable, open to influences, and collaborative. He gets so much energy from comparing and contrasting as an intellectual activity. When you let people affect you strongly, you can mature faster. Being sensitive to other people’s opinions can also hurt. Think about it this way—Namjoon is someone who really took in the criticisms people had about his songs about women and changed completely. Listening makes a person grow. However, he got bullied regularly when he was an emerging idol from a smaller company. Those opinions are also opinions that he listened to. Xin metal can give you the feeling of someone who is willing to go “under the knife” so to speak and cut into themselves to almost reform their appearance.
When I think about Namjoon, I always get a feeling of depth. Metal is found deep within the earth. It is also responsible for pungent flavors and for the emotion of grief. There’s something about Namjoon that makes you really taste him. He’s culturally and aesthetically flavorful. He’s not capable of being bland or of making a bland song. You remember him because of this. He grieves all kinds of things through his music—the late artist Yun Hyong Keun, the things we sacrifice for modernity, and his own youth.
Maybe this flavorfulness is also why Namjoon shows us his struggles with and his criticisms of industrialized music. He cuts into a genre the same way he cuts into a text when reading. He wants to make things better, to improve them. He wants to bring people like him out of the earth, out of hiding, and towards a formation where they can shine.
