Travelling Horse star

Meaning

The Travelling Horse is the star of movement: journeys, moves and changes, a restless and adventurous energy. Its name, 驛馬 yìmǎ, is the post horse of the imperial relay stations, the fresh mount waiting at every stage of the road so that messages could cross the empire without stopping. In a chart it marks a branch where life wants to be on the way.

The tradition reads mobility in every sense: travel and moves, a career that changes place or field, a mind that needs new ground, a readiness to go where things happen. A pillar holding the Horse is read as the part of life where movement comes most naturally; in a luck pillar or a year, as a time of journeys, changes of address or of direction.

Its other face is restlessness, a difficulty in staying put when staying would serve. The tradition values a Horse with somewhere to go, and reads it as energy for change, never as an upheaval foretold.

In practice

• Found from the year and day branches, by the trine each belongs to, and looked for in the other pillars: Yin for the Water trine, Shen, Zi and Chen; Si for the Wood trine, Hai, Mao and Wei; Shen for the Fire trine, Yin, Wu and Xu; Hai for the Metal trine, Si, You and Chou.
• The clash of the trine: each Horse is the branch that clashes with the first branch of its trine, Yin against Shen for Water, Si against Hai for Wood: movement comes from the push of the opposite.
• The four births: the Horses are Yin, Si, Shen and Hai, the branches that open the seasons, where a phase begins its course.
• On the board, the star is listed with the pillars whose branches hold it; its reading says from which pillar it was found and of which trine. In time, a luck pillar or a year whose branch is the Horse brings it for its while.
• Its companions: the Peach Blossom, the Canopy and the General are found the same way, from the same trines.

Across traditions

• In Korea the star has become an everyday word: someone with yeongmasal, “the post-horse influence”, cannot stay in one place for long. Japan reads it as ekiba, Vietnam as Dịch Mã.
• In the imperial post the horses were real: relay stations every few dozen li carried official letters and travellers across China for more than two thousand years, the network the star takes its name from.
• In Western astrology journeys belong to the ninth and third houses, long and short, and to Sagittarius and Mercury: the same restless energy, read from places, a sign and a planet rather than from a branch.

Origin and history

The Travelling Horse is among the oldest and best known of the stars, kept from the “three lives” method by the Zi Ping school; the Yuanhai Ziping and the San Ming Tong Hui give its rule, the branch that clashes with the head of each trine. Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan, which allows the stars no part in the structure, still lets such signs colour a reading, and popular almanacs have always noted the Horse years for travel and moves.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads the Travelling Horse from two bases, the year branch and the day branch. For each it takes the branch’s trine and its Horse, Yin, Si, Shen or Hai, and looks for it in the other pillars: the year’s Horse in the month, day and hour, the day’s in the year, month and hour. For a luck pillar or a year, it looks for either in its branch. The star is shown with the pillars it falls in, and its reading says which base found it.

Correspondences