Charting software gives the shensha their own panel now, colour-coded, sitting there looking like a diagnosis. People arrive reading off it. I have the Canopy. I have Peach Blossom. Does the Travelling Horse explain why I ended up in Australia.
Everything in that panel came out of a table.
What a shensha is
神煞, shensha, gets rendered in English as “stars”, sometimes as “spirits and malefics”. Nothing is being observed in the sky. Each one is a rule of the form: given this stem, or this branch, mark that other branch and call it by a name. The table does the work, and each table is short enough to fit a mnemonic couplet, which is how they were taught and remembered.
Three of the four come off one structure
Take the Shen-Zi-Chen water triad. Shen is where water is born, You beside it is the bath position, and Chen at the far end is the storage. Each of those positions was given a name of its own. The bath position is Peach Blossom, also called Xian Chi. The storage is the Canopy. The branch that clashes the birth position (Shen clashes Yin) is the Travelling Horse, so this triad’s horse sits in Yin. The other three triads work the same way.
So Peach Blossom, Canopy and Travelling Horse are three positions on a single structure, handed separate names. Naming a position makes it easier to teach and easier to remember. It does not put anything into the chart that the five phases and the clash-and-combination relations were not already carrying.
The Nobleman, 天乙贵人, is the odd one out. Its lookup came into Ziping astrology from the Liu Ren tradition, and I have never worked out to my own satisfaction how the derivation runs. Two versions circulate — jia wu geng niu yang 甲戊庚牛羊 and jia wu jian niu yang 甲戊兼牛羊 — one character apart, and depending on which you learned, a Geng-day person’s Nobleman sits in one pair of branches or another. That is why I don’t lean on it hard.
What each one is said to mean
The Nobleman is help. Someone puts a hand out; a stuck thing comes unstuck. It is the best-regarded of the four and the one most often used as a selling point.
The Canopy is solitude, with a leaning toward art and religion. The old texts describe the Canopy person as turned inward, not fond of company, poorly suited to a career built on working a room. In modern terms, someone who would rather sit alone and take one thing deep. It turns up often enough among people in Daoist and artistic lines of work that nobody in the trade finds it surprising.
The Travelling Horse is movement.
Peach Blossom is attraction and social pull, and it gets the ugliest treatment in print. A great deal of older material sees Peach Blossom and starts talking immediately about promiscuity and ruined reputations. I don’t read it that way. It marks charm and the ability to draw people in, which for anyone selling, teaching or standing up in front of a room is an asset. Where it actually goes is settled by other characters in the chart, not by the label.
The Canopy was the parasol carried above an emperor’s carriage, and there is a star group of that name sitting over the imperial seat. A thoroughly grand word, and in the almanacs it ended up meaning a person who prefers their own company. Xian Chi, the other name for Peach Blossom, is also a star name, and the old texts used it for the water the sun was said to bathe in as it went down, which is a fair distance from anything to do with romance.
Two things to check before a shensha means anything
The first is whether the element it sits on is favourable or unfavourable in this particular chart. Suppose a chart with a weak day master that can least afford further drain, and the Nobleman lands squarely on the character doing the draining. The panel says Nobleman, which reads as good news. What you are actually judging is that character: how strong it is, whether it has a root, what is feeding it, which luck pillar will activate it. Once all of that is judged, the word Nobleman adds very little beyond a note to watch the people and situations tied to that character. Turn it around, with the Nobleman on a favourable character that holds the month order and has a root, and the label earns a sentence or two. A row of auspicious stars all sitting on the side of the chart it does not want makes for a good-looking panel, and the hard parts stay hard. Malefics go the other way. One that something else in the chart holds down will often sit there a whole lifetime without going off. Working backwards from the shensha to decide what a chart favours will usually land you somewhere wrong. The order I work in runs: strength of the day master, then favourable and unfavourable elements, then whether the structure is clean, and the shensha last.
The second is clash, combination and void. If a character is clashed open, combined away, or falls in the void, the label pinned to it comes loose along with it. A Travelling Horse that gets clashed moves harder; one that gets combined is a horse on a rope. Reading the panel without this step is counting labels without checking what they are stuck to.
There is a disagreement further down as well. Some books derive the shensha from the year branch and others from the day branch, older practice leaning to the year, current practice to the day. Run the same chart through two books and you get two lists.
The Travelling Horse and migration
Nearly everyone who sits down with me in Sydney or Melbourne has already migrated. Finding the Travelling Horse in the chart at that point and saying there it is, that’s why you left is reasoning backwards. The event has happened, and you are going back to the chart to find a symbol that fits it. Eight characters plus the stems hidden inside the branches give you plenty of hooks. The Canopy gets used for the same job: turned inward, never quite fitted in, so they left. That reads well too.
The test runs the other direction. The Travelling Horse marks a tendency to move, and moving covers changing house, work with constant travel, twenty years of driving between sites inside one city. It does not distinguish a street from an ocean. Hand me a chart with no background attached and ask whether this person emigrates, on the strength of the horse alone, and I won’t answer.
Migration itself involves visas, tax residency, and where the children can enrol. Those go to a migration agent, an accountant and a lawyer. What I can do is date selection, orientation, and a view on timing.
How I use them
The whole chart first. Strength of the day master, favourable element, whether the structure is clean. The shensha get a glance at the end, and most of the time they restate something the chart has already said. Occasionally one makes me stop, usually when a character I had passed over turns out to have two or three labels stacked on it, and I go back and walk its relationships again. That is the extent of it. Look at the shensha by all means, just don’t decide anything with them.