Time and Space: a Graphic Novel of Feng Shui

People often ask how the calendar and astronomy work with feng shui. I hope this small effort helps. Let me know if you’d like more information.

The basics

If you haven’t absorbed the basics of the history of feng shui, start there. This provides only a little of the introductory material.

Notice that the Heaven-Round, Earth Square (tianyuan difang) shows you a central palace (inside the square, which is Earth) surrounded by four palaces (the circle, which is the heavens). Daoist tradition says the tianyuan difang is built from astronomy; you can now see how it was accomplished.

There weren’t any Daoists in Neolithic China, however. The Heaven-Round, Earth-Square was used by Hongshan culture at Niuheliang (3770 to 2920 BCE), and it is found elsewhere in Neolithic China.1

Nu Gua used the legs of the Celestial Turtle to reset the calendar of her time. The four points are the feet of one of the celestial turtles.

Tian Bie, another celestial turtle, was a marker for the coming of winter at the time of the Zhou. Earlier it had been a marker for the spring equinox. It is also associated with the discovery of the Hetu and Luoshu, about the time when Bie crawled out of the river (meaning that precession moved the Milky Way into the position of vernal equinox marker, sometime in the sixth millennium BCE).2

The north is our vantage point as we view these diagrams (the central palace is circumpolar). That is why Nu Gua used a turtle to fix the calendar. It also explains why old Chinese navigational compasses sometimes used turtle-shapes for the lodestone.

Here is a heliocentric, idealized view of how this occurred. First, we round off the orbit of Suixing (Jupiter) so it approximates Earth months.

Then we arrange the sky (and thus our directions) so that there’s a correlation: 12 directions.

Just so we don’t forget this is a stylized version of a heliocentric system and a viewpoint using the celestial globe, here is the three-legged crow of the sun (a sunspot personified).

Now we transfer the markings onto an Earth-shaped board (like a liuren). The crow is there just to remind you that this is heliocentric, because that is usually missing from the discussion.

Next you can see how the system starts to take shape.

References

  1. Sarah M. Nelson, Rachel A. Matson, Rachel M. Roberts, Chris Rock, and Robert E. Stencel. Archaeoastronomical Evidence for Wuism at the Hongshan Site of Niuheliang. 10 June 2006.
  2. Deborah Lynn Porter. From Deluge to Discourse. SUNY Press 1996. Page 36.

    Time and Space: a Graphic Novel of Feng Shui (part 2)

    We have an Earth-shaped concept for a board, and some basic calendar-markers. Now let’s use a real board.

    This is a liuren astrolabe, the device that was used for feng shui before the invention of the zhinan zhen or south-pointing spoon (the first magnetic compass).

    Notice that our original set of calendar-markers seem to correspond with the markings on the liuren? They should, because the liuren was used to calculate the ci or Jupiter stations. But a liuren was much more.

    If you can put the 12 ci on the board, which was common during the time of the Shang, you can also add a lot of other information that was available at the time — ganzhi, directions, and other important points of astronomy.

    The taiji is shown because it, too, is astronomical: it is the pattern of the Sun’s movements in a year, found by using a gnomon. A gnomon is the oldest astronomical device. In China it was still used for ritual purposes, such as the siting of a capital city, as noted in the Zhouli.

    This shows how the bagua (the Luoshu in this case) and the zhi correspond on the liuren. You may also notice that the East Group and West Group generally correspond to the dividing-line between yin and yang, which is determined astronomically. (North is the only exception to the correspondence; buried in the mists of the astronomy must surely be the reason for its inclusion in the East Group.)

    But how old could all of this knowledge be? Here is an interesting discovery from 2006 with star markings. The notches on the side are thought by archaeologists and scholars to indicate the zhi. The stars indicate the sky of a time around when the “axe” was said to have been fashioned (this “snapshot” is 5 July 3100 BCE at 06:30).

    That is all for this installment. The next one should be released in a week or so.