Modern Feng Shui practitioners have to deal with environmental issues that didn't exist in ancient times. Yet problems that were issues then continue to still be problems . . . animal pathways . . . there are techniques that allow us to insulate a home safely from these threats.

Animal pathways are a threat?!?!

And yet every hour America loses another 50 acres of land to suburbs and strip malls. Worldwide a chunk of rainforest the size of New York City disappears every day, along with about 100 species of flora and fauna.

The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. —Alice Walker: Living by the Word (1988)

In 1970, nearly all of the Amazon rainforest was still standing. According to the latest scientific survey, as much as 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest could be cleared within the next 20 years. That means most of Earth's wildlife will disappear as well. The world could lose another fifth of its wildlife diversity in the next few years if the developments trends in Singapore and Indonesia continue.

Looks more like Feng Shui practitioners should be helping animals to avoid the threat of human pathways!

Unfortunately, they probably don't pay well enough for these folks.

The Art of the House Sale

There are three steps in getting a house sold. First, making sure the owners are ready to sell. . . . Sometimes one member . . . simply doesn't want to let go. . . . A part of the purpose for the [Feng Shui] adjustments is to facilitate a change in their attitude.

What if someone in the family doesn't want to move? Are families so dysfunctional these days that they don't listen to one another's opinions and feelings and acknowledge them?

This gives the impression that Feng Shui serves fascism and patriarchal authoritarianism. (New Agers aligned with the most totalitarian and reactionary thinking! It's Nazi occultism all over again!)

When you move into a house it is important to anchor it.

Here you begin to see the DeAmicis gimmickry at work. They want you to believe houses are so flimsy and flighty that you have to "anchor" them or they'll float away!

When you want to move out you have [to] pull those anchors up.

After centuries of not anchoring houses to keep them from floating away, now the only way that people can move is by "pulling up anchors"?!

Ahoy, matey! Thar she blows!

This is not only bovine byproduct, it is floating bovine byproduct!

Using a compass find the most southerly point in the house (True South, not Magnetic South).

How intriguing! I asked the DeAmicis about this technique. I wanted to know what they were using (celestial navigation, field intensity and dip, voodoo economics, the seat of their pants) and asked about declination. Here was the answer Ralph provided by e-mail:

I'm not talking about declination. I am talking about magnetic variation as addressed through navigation. In other words true north on the globe is different from magnetic north and in determining headings. My background is in both navigation and astronomy. . . . I'm sorry that I can't offer some simpler answers, it would certainly save me some time on the computer, but without knowing your back ground I don't know which short hand we can communicate in.

The technique Ralph uses to locate south in your house is one used by ocean liners, fishing boats, and sailboats to navigate the oceans (the other is celestial navigation).

Magnetic variation or secular variation (which the USGS reminds us is also called magnetic declination) is the difference between the average position of the magnetic north pole and the geographic north pole, drawn on an imaginary celestial sphere. Variation shows that the magnetic pole is not perfectly aligned with the rotational axis (spin axis) of the Earth, which is what determines the celestial poles. (Read the great article by Joseph Yu on magnetic variation and feng shui.)

You determine variation with a compass, and you can buy compasses with adjustable declination. To paraphrase Joseph Needham in one of his lectures, the Chinese incorporated declination into one of the newer rings on a Luopan before the West even knew the Earth had magnetic poles.

The long and impressive list of Ralph's careers begins with navigation and astronomy

Ralph says his background is navigation and astronomy, but doesn't seem to know that declination = magnetic variation. He avoids saying that the easiest way to find out the variation in an area is to call the local airport, because runway numbers are based on magnetic headings.

Variation can be either west or east depending on the position of a sailing vessel. Variations for a particular boating area are generally indicated on the compass rose on boating charts and written in degrees. These variations also appear on "true" (celestial sphere) and magnetic rings of a boating compass. The variation is the same no matter what course a boat travels.

So what is this doing in your house?

Ralph wouldn't tell me that. But this is how he explained this technique:

When energy flows through a building from north to south it simply filters through the space. When you place something with some real density in the most southern point its tendancy [sic] is pull [sic] energy to it, thus slowing the flow down and increasing the overall levels of energy inside the home and inducing a stronger feeling of stability and familiarity.
What you need to determine is which direction you would need to travel across the surface of the Earth to reach the true south pole (the axis upon which the globe spins upon[sic]). In other words which way is the energy flowing.

This north-south "energy" blather is Ralph channeling the crackpot theories of Robert Fludd (1574-1637), the founder of English Rosicrucianism, who believed there were two principles to all things: condensation (the boreal or northern virtue) and rarefaction (the southern or austral virtue). Fludd had similarly peculiar ideas about magnetism. He believed that humans had north and south poles like the Earth, and magnetism could only take place when humans slept in a boreal position. That was supposed to be enough to remove the harmful effects of the demons that Fludd believed were inhabiting the human body and causing all illnesses.

Ralph admitted being unaware of the scientific discovery of absolute south, which largely invalidates his theory about Earth, flowing "energy" and the "true south pole," which isn't on Earth anyway.

Goin' south

"South" in scientific terms is identified by the dipole field of an atom of cobalt-60. We all know that dipole fields contain opposites that attract and alikes that repel.

Therefore, any magnetized lodestone or needle that looks like it's pointing north is really pointing south. The North Pole, where the "north" end of our magnets point, is in fact a south magnetic pole.

This is evidence of the nonconservation of parity (eloquently explained by Martin Gardner in The Ambidextrous Universe).

The mix-up in north and south occurred when Westerners first learned of compasses and began investigating the properties of magnets (and getting it wrong). This wasn't a concern for Chinese, because Luopans have always indicated magnetic south (that is, they use the scientific definition of "south"), which may explain why Chinese scientists Lee and Yang took the Nobel Prize half a century ago for proving the nonconservation of parity. Culturally Chinese were primed to understand the world in a way that made the facts stand out. Westerners, in contrast, clung to the unproved belief in a symmetrical universe, which played off the medieval thinking about how a compass works.

Waylaid by arcs

Ralph apparently thought his hocus-pocus language (mixing sacred geometry and boating navigation) would be enough to convince me that he was some kind of Feng Shui expert, and shut me up. Suddenly dowsing appears, and it's more effective than astronomy, celestial navigation, or a compass:

So normally we determine this by establishing magnetic north and adjusting it for the magnetic variation. Although if you had the time you could do this with the creation of the vesica picsis [sic!] with all of its concurrent shadows and arcs.
Usually after we find the true south we'll fine tune it with dowsing because sometimes the flow of energy beneath the building will influence the position of the true grounding point. Once it is in place the building settles down nicely.

You can't adjust magnetic north for magnetic variation; that's something that Earth does on her own. However, you can use a compass to set your magnetic variation for your current location within one of the zones. And here is a great explanation on how to use your variation values.

Notice that you have to be moving to use variation values; that's what makes all of Ralph's "adjustments" so suspicious.

Houses don't move, even after you pull up anchor. Why are you adjusting for magnetic variation if you aren't using it to get somewhere (or, as in the case of airport runways, to come and go)? That's the point of knowing the variation for navigation!

How the "fish bladder" or Vesica Piscis of Christian iconography got tossed into the mix was never explained, but it is suspicious as well.

With gnomons to mark celestial movements, you can draw two arcs that intersect at their ends (which, if perhaps you've had enough chemicals to alter your thinking, could be fancied a "fish bladder') and work out some basic astronomy (such as sundials) and thus geography.

Stick a gnomon in the ground and mark the tip of the shadow. Mark the tip every few minutes to create a line of marks. Connect the points with a line; this provides an east-west orientation.

Take some string and draw an arc with its anchor point at one end of the line of marks. Draw a semicircle past the center point of the line. Repeat the steps with the same radius for the other end of the line. The two arcs should cross north and south of the line. Draw a line to connect the cross points and you'll have a north-south orientation. The entire exercise, completed in just a few minutes, gives you the cardinal directions.

This is how cardinal directions have been determined for thousands of years. You can't get magnetic north with a gnomon, or by using Ralph's "concurrent shadows and arcs."

Ralph is truly ignorant about what he's trying to explain, or he lacks the communication skills to explain what he means; or he just wants to deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate.

Ancient invisible texts

Ralph was unwilling or unable to define what he meant by "energy" in this instance, but found Professor Knoll's idea of qi expressed as ion radiation "limiting" in terms of his dowsing (and no doubt that for him, it is).

I repeatedly asked about the history of "anchoring" and this was the response:

As to the history that's a harder question. I've never run into anything about it in the ancient texts, but then again many cultures, when you review their buildings had their grounding points. What we do is the synthesis of our work and the work of a number of other practitioners.

A rather oblique way of saying that somebody recently invented this "anchoring" idea (Ralph?) and it's been lucrative because they don't usually get questioned about it (or if they do, he gives the questioner some of this word salad that he tried using on me). And it's certainly easier to say "many cultures ... had their grounding points" than it is to quote examples. (I think they'd be hard-pressed to name one culture or point.)

I'd guess that people who believe this hocus-pocus word salad would also want to ban dihydrogen monoxide.

Ralph seemed obsessed with knowing details about me, as if he was trying to figure out how best to effectively market his lunacy.

I didn't mean to toss out any hocus pocus, but I really don't know your back ground or reference points. Part of the difficulty here is that we seem to be confusing our terms. That is why I asked where you are from. It was also be helpful to know your background. What might seem a simple thing to someone might be in an area in which they have not delved. My wife Lahni says that I love to ponder the tiniest secrets of the Universe but in truth I spend a lot of time trying to make it easier for my students and clients to understand.

Which is just the opposite of what was happening, of course. I was asking technical questions, which he did a very poor job of answering, and providing technical information about which he was ignorant. Ralph kept asking about my background to determine what mix of psychobabble, pseudoscience, and con artistry would satisfy me.

He also didn't like that I was asking ever more precise questions about the nature of their techniques, instead of passively accepting what he said, rolling over and offering my wallet.

When he found out that I was a technical writer and have studied Feng Shui from an anthropological standpoint for twenty-some-odd years (which means he could be as technical as he wanted and I'd be able to follow), and when I asked several pointed questions about the kind of compass he used, his calculations, and a few other Feng Shui-techy questions, he did not respond. He'd rather cut and run than have to explain himself.

What are they afraid of? Their marketing statement that anchoring "works quite well, and its influence in house sales is very clear" won't stand up to scrutiny?

Epilogue

Ralph called and emailed in December 2000 and January 2001 to tell me how tall he is, how much he weighs, etc., etc., and that he isn't afraid of anything (well, anything except someone who questions the merits of his alleged "feng shui"). His excuse is that the conversation was going nowhere (which probably means that he didn't anticipate a quick sale).