How to balance and make our home more harmonious by bringing the stars into our home’s center with Feng Shui.
How to deal with stars in our home with Feng Shui starts a long time ago when all ancient civilizations gave great importance to the cult of the dead. China is no exception: from the ancient Book of Burial (circa 4th century BC), we know that Feng-Shui was used to orient tombs. In some recent Neolithic-era discoveries in the Chinese province of Henan, engravings were found inside a burial chamber depicting a dragon on the east side, a tiger on the west side, and Bei Dou, the Big Dipper constellation, in the center.
Another subsequent image of the cosmos, discovered in the tombs of the Han Dynasty, represents the earth with the square structure of a chariot, protected by a circular cover reminiscent of the vault of the sky. One of the first Chinese schools of “geomancy” is called Kanyu, where kan means “vault” and yu means “frame,” referring to the structure of the chariot, and, in the broader sense, heaven and earth, represented on two rotating plates, one circular (masculine) and one square (feminine). Around them were marked the names of the 28 constellations of the Chinese zodiac, divided into four fundamental macro-constellations, corresponding to four Chinese deities: the Vermilion Bird, the Azure Dragon, the White Tiger, and the Black Tortoise.
At the center is the Big Dipper, the throne of Shang Di, the supreme deity. The two plates constituted a cosmograph, progenitor of the Luopan geomantic compass, and were used to calculate time and orientation (space), according to the principle of today’s planisphere.
The position of the Big Dipper was of fundamental importance as it served as a reference for identifying the North Star, which indicates the north of the celestial sphere.
What are the connections between cosmic structure and Feng Shui?
At the time of the spring equinox, the four fundamental macro-constellations of the Chinese zodiac are aligned on the horizon according to the four cardinal points, determining an optimal energy balance between heaven and earth: it is the moment of growth of yang energy.
The “dragon” has the task of initiating the annual cycle by bringing Qi from heaven to earth: it is in fact rising east of the Chinese sky horizon at the time of the spring equinox.
This explains the great importance that the four animals have in Chinese culture: they are the archetypal forms of the four fundamental energies on which the ever-changing balance between heaven and earth is built, or in other words, the figurative representations of the astronomical arrangements of the solar system that make the space-time dimension of the earth-sun cycle manifest and visible.
In our homes this universal structure can be transposed by placing, for example, in the center of the house, after calculating its barycenter, an image of the imperial chariot in China which reproduces the shape of Heaven in the circular geometry of the umbrella roof and the shape of the Earth in the square geometry of the body, as shown by the image of this ancient bronze model:
