5 Yellow star

Meaning

The 5 Yellow, 五黃 wǔ huáng, is the fifth of the nine stars of the Flying Stars: the number 5 of the Lo Shu square, its centre, the one number with no direction of its own. Its classical name is Lian Zhen, 廉貞 lián zhēn; its phase is Earth, and it has no trigram.

The 5 Yellow is the centre of the Lo Shu, the number every line of the square passes through, and the classics call it the emperor’s star, the strongest of the nine. It has no trigram and no direction of its own. In season, in its own period or as one of the two rising before it, it brings command and the power to hold the whole together; out of season the classics read it as the most intense star of all, and wherever it stands they ask for quiet: no heavy works, nothing stirred up.

The 5 ruled Period 5, from 1944 to 1963; in Period 9 it is dormant. When it flies with the year, the classics’ counsel becomes one of the year’s best-known notes, the 5 Yellow that asks a part of the home to rest until Lichun.

In practice

• In a home’s chart: where the 5 stands as the mountain or the water star, practitioners suggest a calm room rather than a busy one, and no heavy works there while it stays; a 5 in the centre as the mountain or water star gives the repeated or opposed chart, and in a replacement chart it keeps its number.
• Now: in Period 9, from 2024 to 2043, the 5 is dormant, out of its time: the classics read it by its out-of-season face, described above, and by the stars beside it and the years that pass.
• The year’s star: the 5 stands in the centre of every home’s year chart in 2022, 2031 and 2040, the year’s star going back one each year at Lichun; in 2026 it is in the south, in 2027 in the north. The Cycles lens reads it over your own directions as asking for calm.
• Its pairs: with the 2 it makes the two earth stars, the pair the classics ask the most quiet for; with itself the 5 twice; with the 9 fire feeding the 5, with the 8 the 5 and the mountain.

Across traditions

• The Dipper: Lian Zhen is the Daoist name of the Dipper’s fifth star, Alioth in the West, the first of the handle and the brightest of the seven.
• The magic square: the Lo Shu is the 3 × 3 magic square, every line adding to 15 round its central 5; Renaissance Europe knew the same square as the table of Saturn, in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1533).
• Nine Star Ki calls a person born in its years 五黄土星 goō dosei, the 5 Yellow Earth star; Feng Shui gives such a year’s yang count the Kua 2, Kun, since 5 has no trigram, and the Eight Mansions give Lian Zhen to Wu Gui.

Origin and history

Yellow is the colour of the centre and of Earth in the old correspondences of the five phases, and of the emperor who stood at the centre of the world: the 5 Yellow takes both. The Lo Shu’s centre made the 5 the pivot of every flight, since each chart begins by setting a number in the centre and sending the others out along the square’s path. The Xuan Kong verses treat it with the most care of all the stars; Ulune keeps their counsel and their tone, a matter of timing and of quiet, never of fear.

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 5 is timely in Periods 3, 4 and 5, its own and the two before it, where it is one of the two stars rising; waning in Period 6, 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, where, having no palace of its own, it flies by the home’s own mountain. As the year’s star it comes back to the centre every nine years.

Correspondences