The Guide Behind the Totem

Travis Barrett LeBlanc

Relationship Counselor, Multi-System Astrologer, and Personal Creator of Totem Astrology

I developed Totem Astrology over the past few decades by traveling the world, talking to thousands of different people, and studying many different astrological systems. I found the precious foundation in the Chinese Four Pillars of Destiny tradition specifically — while others have used this tool for calculating fortunes and fates, my intuition told me that it actually has something more to teach us about the basis for our inner makeup.

My first clue was the four parts: the Year, Month, Day, and Hour. These had to correspond to our Spirit, Mind, Heart, and Body! I did the calculations, but something was still off. The upper half of the information rang true with the Year and the Month, but the bottom half with the Day and the Hour didn't seem to line up as well with the facts of the people standing right in front of me. I fiddled with it for years before a sudden intuition clued me in: the Four Pillars System claims its birthright from the Jade Emperor, in some traditions handed straight down from the Buddha himself.

Since the Buddha's traditional birthplace is in Nepal, I decided to start shifting people's birth times to the Nepalese time zone before adding their info to the Four Pillars Calculator — and suddenly, voilà! This new birth data finally clicked everything into place. So now here on our website, the Totem Calculator does all that for you: just plug in your birth date, time, and place, and the shift is already incorporated before your four animals come out. Now what you see really does line up with your Spirit, Mind, Heart, and Body!

Philosophy

I like to think of these four animals as the cards you were dealt at the beginning of this life. They are built right in there from the beginning for you to take advantage of, but they don't seal your fate in the slightest. You've always got the opportunity to work on them and refine them, or even disregard them completely and bluff sometimes if you want to! But it certainly helps to know what you're playing with since the game is already in motion.

A central tenet of Totem Astrology is hope — hope for a better understanding of yourself, hope to better understand your partners and family members, and hope that there is someone, or someones, out there who are compatible with you just the way you are. The four guides give us a kind of shared language: something abstract to symbolize what is going on for us internally, so we can talk about our differences without every conversation turning into a trial.

This is not an excuse for bad behavior, nor is it a reason to accept other people's bad behavior. It is a tool for understanding each other and giving each other some grace — grace born from comprehension of our differences and appreciation of the different modes people operate within. When we see that a loved one's tardiness might come bundled with a Cat or Deer's dreamy creativity, or a Tiger or Horse's readiness to spring into action, we gain windows into what may be going on inside — always with the goal of correcting our own inner deficiencies and being gracious with the shortcomings of others, not excusing harm.

Everybody else has their own four animals too, and it can help to know what we're all working with so we can understand each other better and enjoy our differences instead of fighting over them. Different animals have different strengths and each totem carries its own wisdom.