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) — what John Major calls the “cliche” of early China — shows you a central palace (inside the square, which is Earth) surrounded by four palaces (the circle, which is the heavens).

At 90 degrees north latitude, at the north geographic pole, the celestial and terrestrial Equators are equal. Here the North Star is directly above you, and the stars travel anticlockwise around the horizon. This is the situation idealized by the Central Pool of Heaven, where the needle is housed in a Luopan. The red cross lines on a luopan indicate the two principal meridians of the celestial sphere. One line passes through the poles and the two solstices. The other line passes through the celestial poles and the ecliptic at the two equinoxes.

Anticlockwise is the direction of the stars, the Jupiter stations (ci), and the stems. The branches move clockwise.

Daoist tradition says the tianyuan difang is built from astronomy. 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 There weren’t any Daoists in Neolithic China, however.

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 an 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 circle, 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 and circumpolar.

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.