Symbolic stars

Meaning

The symbolic stars are the signs BaZi finds in a chart by fixed tables: a branch or a stem that, for a given Day Master, year, day or month, carries a traditional name and a traditional meaning. They are not stars in the sky. The Chinese name, 神煞 shénshà, pairs 神, the spirits that help, with 煞, the forces that weigh, and the old books list hundreds of both; Ulune reads fourteen of the most common, almost all of the helpful kind.

Each is a short, memorable meaning. The Nobleman is help that arrives when it is needed, the Academic star a gift for study, the Peach Blossom charm, the Travelling Horse movement, the Canopy solitude and the life of the mind, the General leadership. Some come from the Day Master, like the Prosperity star and the Sword Edge, which are its own life stages under another name; others from the branches of the year and the day, from the month or from the order of the stems.

Ulune reads them as most schools of the Zi Ping tradition do: as secondary signs, nuances rather than verdicts, read after the Day Master, the Ten Gods and the balance of the phases. A star adds a colour to the pillar it falls in; it never decides a reading on its own, and none is a fate. That is also why Ulune leaves aside the harsher names of the old lists: they add worry, not understanding.

In practice

• On the board, the symbolic stars of a chart are listed with the pillars they fall in; each star’s reading says what it stands for and how it was found, from which pillar or from the Day Master, and in which branch or stem.
• Five come from the Day Master: the Nobleman, the Academic star, the Prosperity star, the Golden Carriage and, for the yang Day Masters only, the Sword Edge.
• Four come from the year and day branches, by the trine each belongs to: the Peach Blossom, the Travelling Horse, the Canopy and the General, looked for in the other pillars.
• Two come from the month branch, Heavenly Virtue and Monthly Virtue; two from the year branch, the Red Phoenix and Heavenly Joy; and one from the stems in order, the Three Wonders.
• In time, a luck pillar or a year can bring a star with its branch or its stem, found by the same tables from the chart; the full table lists them in the luck pillar’s and the year’s rows.

Across traditions

• In Japan and Korea the same stars are read beside the four pillars: Japan’s Shichū Suimei knows the Nobleman as ten’otsu kijin, and in Korea the Peach Blossom and the Travelling Horse, dohwasal and yeongmasal, have passed into everyday speech for charm and for a restless, travelling spirit.
• In Zi Wei Dou Shu, the other great Chinese art of the birth chart, many of the same names, the Red Phoenix, Heavenly Joy, the Canopy, appear as minor stars placed round twelve palaces.
• In Western astrology the nearest equivalents are the lots and the fixed stars, signs found by rule or by position that add a nuance to a chart already read through its planets.

Origin and history

The symbolic stars belong to the older layer of Chinese birth reading, the “three lives” method of the Tang and early Song dynasties, which read a birth mainly from its year and gave great weight to such signs. When the Zi Ping school moved the centre to the Day Master, it kept the most useful of them: the Yuanhai Ziping of the Song gives their tables, and Wan Minying’s San Ming Tong Hui, in the 16th century, gathers well over a hundred, with the verses by which they were taught. Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan, in the 18th century, gives a chapter to the principle that the stars have no bearing on the structure, which rests on the gods of the month: they may colour a chart, but they do not make it. Modern teachers have mostly followed him.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads fourteen stars, each from its classical table as most books give it, and says which base it uses where schools differ. From the Day Master: the Nobleman’s two branches, the Academic star, the Prosperity star (the stem’s Prosperity stage), the Golden Carriage two branches after it, and the Sword Edge (the yang stem’s Peak; the yin stems’ is disputed and left out). From the year branch and from the day branch, by their trines: the Peach Blossom, the Travelling Horse, the Canopy and the General, each looked for in the other pillars. From the month branch: Heavenly Virtue, a stem or a branch, and Monthly Virtue, a stem. From the year branch: the Red Phoenix, counted backward from Mao, and Heavenly Joy opposite it. From the stems: the Three Wonders, three stems in one of three orders on three pillars side by side. For a luck pillar or a year, the same tables fall on its branch or stem.

Correspondences