Nobleman star

Meaning

The Nobleman is the most valued of the symbolic stars: help that arrives when it is needed, people of good will, a way through difficulty. Its full name, 天乙貴人 tiānyǐ guìrén, is “the noble one of Heaven’s First”, after a star god of the sky’s centre, and the second half of it is an everyday word: in Chinese a 貴人 guìrén is a benefactor, the person who turns up at the right moment and opens a door.

The tradition reads support from others, and a gift for finding it. A Day Master with its Nobleman in a pillar is read as well met in the part of life that pillar stands for. Ulune keeps to the reading’s own words: help, good will, a way through, never a promise that nothing will be hard.

The star also says something about how help comes. It is not a fortune that falls from the sky but a meeting, and the classics praise those who recognise it: the Nobleman is read as much in the gift of asking, of being open and grateful, as in the help itself.

In practice

• Found from the Day Master: each stem has two Nobleman branches, sought in every pillar, the day’s own branch included: Jia, Wu and Geng in Chou and Wei; Yi and Ji in Zi and Shen; Bing and Ding in Hai and You; Ren and Gui in Mao and Si; Xin in Wu and Yin.
• On the board, the star is listed with the pillars whose branches hold it; its reading says what it stands for and which branches the Day Master looks for.
• In time, a luck pillar or a year whose branch is one of the two brings the Nobleman for its while, and the full table shows it in that row: a decade or a year of good meetings, as the tradition puts it.
• Never in Chen or Xu: the table uses ten of the twelve branches and leaves out Chen and Xu, which the tradition calls the net of heaven and the net of earth, where the Nobleman does not go.
• With the other stars: Heavenly Virtue and Monthly Virtue are its gentler companions, protection and kindness found from the month.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the star is ten’otsu kijin, cheoneul gwiin and Thiên Ất Quý Nhân, valued there as in China.
• In Da Liu Ren, the oldest of the Chinese arts of the moment, the Nobleman heads the twelve heavenly generals, the spirits the method places round its board.
• In Western astrology the nearest figure is Jupiter, the greater benefic, and the eleventh house, which Hellenistic astrologers called the Good Spirit, the place of friends and benefactors: help read from a planet and a place rather than from a branch.

Origin and history

The Nobleman is among the oldest of the stars, already central to the “three lives” method of the Tang and Song dynasties, which found it from the year stem. The Zi Ping school kept it and read it from the Day Master as well; the Yuanhai Ziping gives its table, and the San Ming Tong Hui teaches it by a verse every student learned: “Jia, Wu and Geng, the Ox and the Goat; Yi and Ji, the Rat and the Monkey; Bing and Ding, the Pig and the Rooster; Ren and Gui hide in the Rabbit and the Snake; the six Xin meet the Horse and the Tiger.” Some books divide each pair into a Nobleman of the day and one of the night, for births by daylight or after dark; most read both.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads the Nobleman from the Day Master alone, as most modern books do, and looks for both of its branches in every pillar of the chart, the day’s own included. Its table is the verse’s: Chou and Wei for Jia, Wu and Geng; Zi and Shen for Yi and Ji; Hai and You for Bing and Ding; Mao and Si for Ren and Gui; Wu and Yin for Xin. Schools that read it from the year stem too would find more Noblemen; Ulune says which base it uses in the star’s reading. For a luck pillar or a year, the same two branches are looked for in its branch.

Correspondences