20th April 2005
Kuk Yu: grain rains; Da Vinci Code cash in; Water: latest news…
Richard Ashworth
Feng Shui Diaries
Kuk Yu: Grain Rains
Solar fortnight beginning:
Wednesday April 20th 2005 08.00
Hour Day Month Year
earth wood metal wood
mow gap gung yute
shun sute shun yuw
dragon dog dragon rooster
Kuk Yu: Grain Rains
The rain that swells the grain falls traditionally in this, the second half of the Dragon month: April Showers. As Jeremy Paxman said tersely, when forced to include a weather forecast on BBC Newsnight: “The weather. Rain. It’s April. What did you expect?”
We are now only two months short of ha gee, the Summer Solstice, when the chi peaks. If you are improving your home, do not commence at the West or East or you may fall foul of this year’s ruling animal the Wood Rooster.
Shun, the Dragon, enjoys a special relationship with yuw the Rooster. When they meet he becomes metal. To put it another way, in a Rooster year, the Dragon month chi turns to metal. Metal is competitive, at its worst aggressive. Generally the Dragon is above competition, only entering when he has won already. So this April is an unusual month.
If you factor in sute, the Dog (in the day column, above) and his antipathy for the Dragon, it is clear that this month possesses the qualities both of cooperation and implied threat.
Whether this will be most obvious in domestic politics where of course an election is imminent, on the global stage or at home, is a question of personal experience. Metal often relates to money and the beginning of the tax year presents unique opportunities. Perhaps speculation may pay off. Earth changing to metal speaks of the release of wealth and the confrontation of sute and shun is often interpreted as the opening of a vault of treasure. Those of us still unembarrassed by Make Poverty History wristbands may be hoping that wealth will travel from North to South.
Da Vinci Code Cash In
When I first approached the late Victorian apartment block where Sally lived, one of the first things I noticed was the date AD 96 picked out proudly in the bricks at the front.
Masonic, I guessed. I often notice the touch of master masons on Victorian buildings: precise and square, the dimensions and proportions reliable. And the alignment is often marginally off the cardinal points. Sally’s was no exception: just missing East-West.
I guessed the date was a reference to some obscure event in Templar history. It turned out to be the year the Book of Revelation was written.
There were two main entrances, both low and dark, set up so as to pull the visitor into the basement. The numbering was eccentric and I suspected corridors I couldn’t quite locate.
The house as a whole was an irregular shape missing a chunk of the North East: the ghost gate of Chinese tradition. Since it was purpose built, this must have been deliberate. And Sally’s flat was oriented exactly opposite to the building; a rebellious sort of place. She is an artist with a very individual take on life, so this all fitted. Half the flats were oriented this way, the other half oriented, sheeplike, the same as the block.
Freemasonry claims roots in Egypt and Mesopotamia.and feng Shui is not of course uniquely Chinese. No truth belongs to a single culture. It is just that the Chinese have the best records. You will see signs of the same learning in the Valley of Kings and in pre-Celtic standing stones. The Great Pyramid of Cheops and its two companions clearly mimic the stars of Orion’s Belt, a constellation depicted at the centre of my Chinese Compass. Many observers (notably Derek Walters) have noted that Stonehenge is aligned South-West/ North-East, along the line of the ghost gate.
Predictably Sally’s flat contained very unsettled stuff. We protected her with tourmalin and t’ang lung shapes and I prescribed the traditional red curtains against the woo woo.
We discussed how she might approach being left with this energy night after night. We agreed that woo-woo stuff wants love and understanding just like you and me. Going into spooky spaces and shouting is just silly.
The difficult rooms were her study and bedroom. The energy was pedantic and rowdy, very male, arrogant, a bit like a rugby club bar but only threatening if you took it seriously.Girls know about this stuff.
What she hadn’t told me about upfront was her own heartbreak.
As it happened Sally had parted relatively recently and relatively reluctantly from a self-destructive spouse and was still grieving. I suggested she find the place in her that still held on and just give it love. Within herself she could locate the rather daft male energy that she had loved for so long. Here her ex and the stuff suppressing her bedroom were one and the same.
Does this seem like dreary new-age nonsense? Ah well.
I haven’t read Dan Brown’s blockbuster. I don’t want to. I know this makes me a bit precious, I tell my daughters who demand I do. I was grailed out by the mid 80’s.
I visited Rennes le Chateau. I peered into the Abbe Sauniere’s garden – it was fenced up by 1983. I spent days while on holiday in the Languedoc locating the crypt depicted in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego; I don’t want to go into it all again. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail authors placed the crypt on the wrong side of the road, by the way.
Years before my daughters were born, I tried my first wife’s patience photographing Masonic tombs in the Highlands. I pondered endlessly the connections between dark age Visigoths and the Merovingian kings. I speculated that the Papal interdict of 1307 could have left an open window through which the Templars might have entered Scotland. At Rosslyn I saw the carving depicting maize a century and a half before Columbus.
Not again, please.
So, even if the Da Vinci Code is a cynical, indisciplined exploitation of mysteries that on examination slip through the fingers, there is something there. But I’m not going after it.
Water: Latest News.
By way of variation, this week I have been coming across water not at the North West where, you may remember, it undermines the Father but at the heart of the house: the tai chi. The Tai Chi is where the widest width and the longest length of the house intersect. Being the heart it wants generally neither to be melted with fire nor swamped with water. The tai chi varies from house to house according to orientation. Where the chi at the heart is particularly malign, it is a positive benefit to flood it. But where the chi is healthy, water will tend to dilute the health.
Both of these houses were oriented East-West which places the 6:1 toe far, true love pattern at the heart. Since this is made up of metal and water, draining it is particularly wasteful. In one of these, interestingly, I prescribed water in the North West because it was actually too strong. Funny old world.
Any feedback is of course always welcome including notice that you never want to hear from me again if that happens to be the case.
Best wishes,
Richard Ashworth
Richardashworthfengshui@hotmail.com
Richard is featured in Channel Five’s Housebusters during 2005.
As ever, names have been changed to protect privacy.