Earthly Branches

The Earthly Branches are a set of twelve ordinal symbols (Zi through Hai), each tied to a Chinese zodiac animal, a two-hour period, an element, and a polarity. Each branch also contains one to three hidden stems, which is what lets a branch take part in element and Ten-God analysis. The stem-and-element tables are well attested across sources, while the secondary hidden-stem assignments vary.