Right now, I'm translating a very old divinatory text called The Creation Key, annotated by Xu Lewu during the War of Liberation and last republished in the Fire Horse year of 1966. As I'm having fun with translation, one particular phrase sticks out to me: food and clothes.

"Food and clothes" is how The Creation Key describes about different people and their charts and what the charts say about their work and life.

One idea embedded into the astrology here in the places where I live, the former Calvinist colonies of North America, is this idea of a higher calling. You see this idea of a higher spiritual calling everywhere but you see it the most in descriptions of the midheaven as the highest point in your natal chart.

Calvinists identified an authentic vocation as a spiritual calling that literally comes from God Himself. That's why work is so fetishized in the religion. To be devout was to work but not just any kind of work. Devotion was the answer to the call to higher forms of work, the abstract and intellectual kind where you use your mind rather than your hands.

I think that this idealistic attitude to work produces a lot of anxiety in people.

I have noticed that the idea that work needs to be an individual, spiritual calling really freaks people out. It produces a weird kind of perfectionism. If you are spiritually called towards a purpose, then you tend to judge yourself morally for the normal mistakes that you make when you learn a craft or a skill. Being bad at something, which I assume everyone is when we are learning something for the first time, is no longer just the normal state of affairs but becomes a character issue. If it's within your purpose, then shouldn't you have natural talent and succeed the first time??

Being out of practice or just not there yet in terms of competency because you just started will freak you out when you believe that one mistake or obstacle is evidence that your work isn't spiritually meant for you. You also start to question the significance of your work and your personal self importance. It becomes an ego thing.

I noticed that, in bazi, work is described much more pragmatically. In bazi, work not described as a higher spiritual calling that you are meant to give everything up for. Instead, your work is supposed to resource your life as a whole or your community as a whole. Your work is supposed to provide you with two things: food and clothes.

Does the income that you make from work help you feed yourself and your family? This question will help you understand whether your work nourishes your life and whether working the way you do is sustainable.

Do your elders teach you what your work is? Do you have young people around you for you to teach? These questions help you understand whether there's work that gets kept from you or gets stuck with you. It helps you clarify your role in a wider community.

Do you receive recognition for your contributions to your society and do you have enough time to learn how to do what you want to do? Do you feel the need to buy recognition by exhausting your own capacity? This question will help you understand whether you are able to feel decisive about what you do because you feel comfortable in your sense of authority.

Why singular (and fragile) are your skills? How mixed (and contradictory) are your skills? This questions will help you understand how you adapt your work to a changing world.

Bazi, as a language, is built to analyze these more pragmatic questions rather than looking at vocation as the highest purpose where you just follow your calling no matter what. At first, I judged these more pragmatic questions because the part of me that expects inspirational or idealistic purpose to carry me in my work simply saw these types of questions as boring or not spiritual enough. But as I translate more and more of The Creation Key? I realized that these questions aren't boring at all. They're about your role in society. They're profoundly spiritual in the way that the spiritual is political.

Your work is supposed to give you food and clothes. Food is about material resources. Are you able to feed yourself with your vocation? Are you able to feed your family? Clothes represents your dignity. Are you able to clothe yourself with your vocation? Can you find a sense of dignity or recognition?

And The Creation Key does generalize. It tends to discuss two different types of imbalances when it comes to one's work: ungrounded aspiration and buying a title. I will try to describe these two conditions in this article below.

Ungrounded Aspiration

Ungrounded aspiration tends to show up in The Creation Key when a person's chart tried to perform or produce more than it can sustain. It tends to show up when a person is ill resourced, when they are not paid enough to do the work that they do.

When the chart is unbalanced, it creates a situation where the person says that they do more than they actually do.

This is not a character flaw. This is a situation where the person is trying to produce more than they have the capacity to do, where the person is in need of support and resources because they want to do more than they currently can. This is important to note because there's nothing wrong with having a vision or a lot of ideas. It's just that those ideas can become ungrounded if the person tries to chase symbolic value without taking a look at how they are paid or whether their work feeds them.

The imbalance in the chart would be that the person wears too many clothes—wears too many identities,—and doesn't have enough food, food being substantial support. The imbalance in the chart can create a scenario where someone wants to contribute their community in a lot of different ways all the time but is not paid enough to take care of their own body and kin. That situation is a paradox. No amount of symbolic value will right that balance because what is needed because, for that person to be as productive as they desire, they actually need material support. Not symbolic value.

Support in bazi is not just about food but also about education. If your chart tries to produce too much without having enough support, it can also describe a situation where you lack access to history. Trying to produce significant meaning without having that history is also a paradox because history is the nutrition of meaning. Having a chart structure where you produce more than you receive can also indicate a reluctance to listen to and trust one's elders. That needs to be remediated with care.

Someone who encounters timing that unbalances their chart in this way might feel overly rushed, like they can't relax or trust people. Remediation would have to do with noticing and growing the support that already exists in the person's life one step at a time. That can start with food.

Buying a title

The other situation that The Creation Key sometimes describes is someone who has a lot of wealth spirit but lacks pressure. This is another kind of imbalance and also not a character flaw.

When someone has a lot of wealth spirit, they have a lot of competency. They tend to be the person who is really good at managing stuff and they know how to stretch a dime to take care of the whole family. They are focused not just on income but on benefits, financial planning, and taking care of their parents in old age but they also put all of themselves into choosing work that will allow themselves to do these things. They are providers but they lack recognition.

The imbalance here is about being too attached to what one already does well and becoming too risk adverse. Being too attached to the responsibilities that you currently have can make you less tolerant of and feel less in control of change.

This imbalance would be a situation where someone has enough food to feed their family but doesn't have enough clothes, clothes being your sense of dignity, identity, and authority. This person is doing a lot of caretaking or performs tasks well but struggles to find a sense of self importance. People take them for granted. Because they lack recognition, they feel a lack of control over their decisions.

The Creation Key describes this type of imbalance as someone who constantly tries to buy significance to their loved ones or social standing within their family using their body, their time, and their labor. Someone with this imbalance actually doesn't need to put in more work because they are already do enough for their loved ones and community. In fact, they are too busy maintaining the structures around them to think about how they want to change or break the patterns that they have inherited. What they need is recognition of the ways in which they already have and can change their community. Seeing themselves as someone who has and can change history, not just a maintainer or a fixer, is what helps someone with this kind of chart recognize their own life as significant.

Supported Accomplishment

When the chart is balanced, then the person basically has enough food and clothes. Because they have enough food, they are able to actually do what they want to do and take care of their family materially because they are fed. Because they have enough clothes, they have enough dignity to recognize that they aren't just here to fix the status quo but to change something. They see themselves as someone who can change history and build the support they need to actually materialize what they seek to change.

Essentially, having enough food and clothes in your chart means that you are fed and dignified by your work.

Usually, this type of perfect balance is very temporary. No one is born with it or stays in balance forever. You might have it in your life at the most random times and then it goes away and you work with whatever imbalance it becomes because your life is always changing.


I wanted to share these findings as I continue to translate The Creation Key because I thought that they were interesting. I found them more useful when thinking about the many more pragmatic questions that we have around work than the idea of a divine calling, higher purpose, or natural talent. Maybe you do too.