1 White star

Meaning

The 1 White, 一白 yī bái, is the first of the nine stars of the Flying Stars: the number 1 of the Lo Shu square, whose own palace is the north. Its classical name is Tan Lang, 貪狼 tān láng; its phase is Water, its trigram Kan ☵.

The classics give the 1 White, the middle son of the trigrams’ family, wisdom and learning, careers and journeys, and the first steps of a romance: water that finds its way, and news that comes from afar. In season it brings recognition through knowledge and careers that move forward; out of season they read it as restlessness, thought without an anchor and too much time spent away.

Its colour, white, it shares with the 6 and the 8: with the 9 Purple, the three white stars are the ones the Xuan Kong verses welcome most, and the classical Verse of Purple and White, the Zi Bai Jue, takes its name from them. In Period 9 the 1 is already timely, the first of the two stars rising after the 9, read as a support that grows.

In practice

• In a home’s chart: where the 1 stands as the water star, practitioners like an open, lively space, a door, a living room, a study in use; as the mountain star, a steady, quiet room for the people of the home, a bedroom or a reading corner. Timely now, it is one of the stars the present period asks to use.
• Now: in Period 9, from 2024 to 2043, the 1 is timely, one of the two stars rising after the 9; the classics read it as support where it stands.
• The year’s star: the 1 stands in the centre of every home’s year chart in 2026 and 2035, the year’s star going back one each year at Lichun; in 2026 it is in the centre, in 2027 in the north-west. The Cycles lens reads it over your own directions as supportive.
• Its pairs: with the 4 it makes the scholar’s pairing, the classics’ most quoted pair for study; with the 6 the He Tu pair of water; with the 9 water and fire in balance, a Combination of Ten; with the 8 water held by the mountain.

Across traditions

• The Dipper: Tan Lang is the name Daoist star lore gives the first star of the Northern Dipper, Dubhe in the West, one of the two Pointers that lead the eye to the pole star.
• Nine Star Ki, the Japanese school of the same nine stars, calls a person born in its years 一白水星 ippaku suisei, the 1 White Water star; Feng Shui’s Kua 1 for the yang count comes from the same years.
• The Eight Mansions give the same name, Tan Lang, to Sheng Qi, the direction of growth, and Zi Wei Dou Shu, Purple Star astrology, keeps Tan Lang among its fourteen main stars.

Origin and history

The nine stars’ names come from the sky. Sima Qian’s treatise on the celestial offices, around 94 BC, calls the Northern Dipper the emperor’s chariot, turning round the centre and setting the four seasons in order; Daoist lore later gave its seven stars and two attendants the names the Flying Stars use, Tan Lang first. The numbers come from the Lo Shu, where the 1 sits at the bottom of the square, the north, as the tradition draws it with the south at the top. The Xuan Kong school joined the two, so that each number carries a Dipper star’s name, a colour and a trigram, and the 1, which opens the count, opens every cycle of nine periods: Period 1 began in 1864 and begins again in 2044.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune keeps the nine stars as the numbers of the Lo Shu, each with its colour, its classical name and its phase. The 1 is timely in Periods 1, 8 and 9, its own and the two before it, where it is one of the two stars rising; waning in Period 2, the one after its own; dormant in the other four. In a home’s chart it can stand in any palace as the period star, the mountain star or the water star: it goes where the flight from the centre sends it, forward or backward by the polarity of the mountains, and when it is the number met in the sitting or the facing palace it goes to the centre itself. As the year’s star it comes back to the centre every nine years.

Correspondences