Three Wonders star

Meaning

The Three Wonders appear when three Heavenly Stems follow each other in one of three rare orders on three pillars side by side: an unusual mind, talent, and breadth of vision. The name, 三奇 sānqí, means “three marvels”; the three orders are the Wonders of heaven, Jia, Wu and Geng; of earth, Yi, Bing and Ding; and of man, Ren, Gui and Xin.

The tradition reads a chart touched by something out of the ordinary: original thinking, a talent that stands out, an ability to see wide and far, often a life that does not follow the usual path. The star is unlike the others: it depends on no base branch or stem, but on an arrangement of the stems themselves, which is why it is so seldom found.

Rarity is not merit, and Ulune reads it with the same calm as every star: a nuance, the classics’ way of noticing an unusual pattern, never a sign of a better or a stranger life.

In practice

• The three orders: Jia, Wu and Geng, the Wonders of heaven; Yi, Bing and Ding, the Wonders of earth; Ren, Gui and Xin, the Wonders of man.
• Side by side, in order: the three stems must stand on three neighbouring pillars and in that order, the year’s, the month’s and the day’s, or the month’s, the day’s and the hour’s; Jia in the year, Wu in the month and Geng in the day is one of them.
• On the board, the star is listed with the three pillars that make it; its reading names the three stems and the pillars, and says which order they follow.
• In time: the Three Wonders need three pillars side by side, so a luck pillar or a year, which stands alone, does not bring them; the full table shows them only for the birth.
• With the Day Master: when the three fall on the year, the month and the day, the Day Master is the last of them, Geng, Ding or Xin; when they fall on the month, the day and the hour, it is the middle one, Wu, Bing or Gui.

Across traditions

• In Qimen Dunjia, the Chinese art of the strategic moment, Yi, Bing and Ding are also called the Three Wonders, the wonders of the sun, the moon and the stars on its board: the same name for one of the same orders, in a different art.
• In Western astrology, the nearest ideas are the rare patterns of a chart, a grand trine or a stellium, read as a striking configuration rather than as a planet: a shape among the factors, as the Wonders are a shape among the stems.

Origin and history

The Three Wonders come from the older layer of Chinese divination, whose manuscripts Marc Kalinowski and his colleagues have studied, where the stems were counted in sequences of their own; Qimen Dunjia, already practised under the Song, gave Yi, Bing and Ding that name. The Zi Ping school’s books, the Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui, list the three orders among the symbolic stars of a birth, with the rule that they must follow each other in the pillars, some books accepting the reversed order too. Ulune keeps the forward order only, as most modern teachers do.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune looks at the stems of the chart’s pillars in their order, year, month, day and hour, and finds the Three Wonders whenever three neighbouring stems match one of the three orders exactly: Jia, Wu and Geng; Yi, Bing and Ding; Ren, Gui and Xin. Without a birth time it can only check the year, month and day. The star is shown with the three pillars that make it, and its reading names them.

Correspondences