A Book Review by Kartar Diamond
With more than one book sharing the same title, Stephen Skinner’s Flying Star Feng Shui distinguishes itself from other authors right in the opening pages. Without realizing how incompatible Feng Shui is with communism, or the People’s Republic of China in particular, it might otherwise be easy to assume that the birthplace of Feng Shui celebrates one of their most popular exports, with top masters teaching and consulting there. And yet, as Skinner informs, the public and professional practice of Feng Shui has been suppressed in China for nearly a century.
Skinner explains how inferior English translations of Chinese characters have lost or subverted their correct meaning and nuance for feng shui terms, and yet we are fortunate that Feng Shui practice has survived at all, openly now in many western countries and under the radar in places where the governments would prefer to marginalize or ban it.
Sometimes the word “ch’i” or Qi gets downgraded to mean “energy” when it is really beyond energy and more like what supplies everything with energy. This is just an example of choosing an English word to approximate these pervasive, unseen forces. And yet, some translations or concepts don’t convey the correct meaning at all, such as with the word “luck.” We Westerners might say “Good luck” to someone, meaning that we wish them some happy, random fortune or outcome. Skinner writes, “Luck, for the Chinese, is seen like a commodity that can be accumulated, can be lost, and can even be stolen.” With Feng Shui practices, we can predict when luck will occur, when it may be sabotaged, and also how to collect it, increase it and store it. This is an entirely different concept for the English word “luck.”
Skinner announces at the beginning that he will use the older Wade-Giles transliteration method from Chinese to English, as opposed to the newer pinyin style. His reasoning is to make it easier for those reading previous publications. In my own training, my first teacher started out with Wade-Giles transliterations, and without much explanation changed everything to pinyin a few years later. This is why you will see some spell the Northwest trigram as Ch’ien, while others write Qian or how the West trigram Tui is alternatively written as Dui.
Chapter One is a crisp introduction into fundamental feng shui principles, and essential for understanding the Flying Stars. It’s worth reading, even for those who don’t need a review, as the author’s commentary is special. He emphasizes that Yin-Yang theory is really about the relationship between two phenomenon and not the features themselves. For example, “hot” is only yang in comparison to “cold” as the more yin in the relationship. We could say further that “boiling hot” is yang to “warm” as the yin counterpart.
He mentions the Three Primes as Heaven, Man, and Earth Luck. It’s relevant to know that Man (human) cannot easily alter their Heaven Luck (fate/destiny), but Feng Shui can alter the luck we receive from Earth. He moves into explanations of the Elements, as movable energies, not to be confused with “elements” from the Periodic Table. Those Elements manifest in three distinct relationships and are featured in the Eight Trigrams, the building blocks of Feng Shui.
Skinner highlights the different Lo Shu, and the transformation of the mystical Lo Shu squares due to factors of time. Speaking of time, the following chapter clearly introduces both the solar and lunar calendars as he explains why Feng Shui uses the solar calendar, along with some impressive facts from Chinese history. The Chinese were ahead of the rest of the world by a thousand years in terms of their sophistication in time-keeping.
Skinner also mentions a little “diagnostic” technique not known by every feng shui practitioner, to determine one layer of an occupant’s compatibility with their home. He states that one can take the Chinese stem and branch for the year a house was built and compare that with the person’s own Year Stem and Branch (Chinese astrology). He gives the example that a Yang Metal house would not be good for a Yin Wood person because Metal destroys Wood. Said differently, a house built in 1990 could have a dominating influence on a person born in 1965, as one example. Charts and Tables showing which elements rule any given year can be found easily in Chinese astrology books or on-line, but one must also be familiar with Five Element Theory to appreciate the comparisons.
This technique is a more specific comparison of house vs. person than the popular Eight Mansion School, where a West Group person is deemed not compatible with an East Group House or vice versa. Another example of direction would be the challenge of a person living in a house that sits in their own Opposition sign, like a Snake person living in a house that “sits” in the Pig Sector. These observations are based on direction, whereas Skinner gives a whole different perspective just based on time (as in birth year of occupant and construction year of house).
Skinner’s chapter introducing the Feng Shui compass (luopan) includes an historical fact that I find amazing, which is that the first Chinese compass dates back to the 4th century BC, some 1500 years before the compass was used for maritime navigation by Europeans.
While explaining the complexity of the Luopan, he writes that the rings around it divide the 360 degrees into segments as few as eight (for the eight basic directions) to as many as 720 divisions. This means there are luopan which delineate down to one half of a degree.
But rest assured, the flying star practitioner only needs to identify one of 24 possibilities (each with a 15-degree span) in order to determine orientation. This is quite easy compared to the smaller increments.
He has a section on how to conduct a compass reading whether you are using a real luopan, a makeshift luopan or a regular western camping compass. What is puzzling here is that the author instructs those using a regular western compass to face away from the building they are measuring instead of facing toward the building. He laments later on that the regular camping compass may be harder to use since it does not have a flat edge with which to place in your sight line parallel to the facing wall for an accurate compass reading. Based on that, I would say, all the more reason to FACE the building instead of turning your back to it.
My own Cammenga military compass has an attached metallic cover, which when opened, it provides a little straight line as a reference point when doing a reading. Problem Solved. Skinner includes in the same chapter an introduction to the concept of Sitting and Facing, which are essential basics since not all homes or commercial properties face the same direction as their main entrance.
The Great Bear (Ursa Major) constellation, home of the Big Dipper, begins the story of the 9 stars referred to as the Flying Stars. Skinner gives us very detailed information about these stars, their Chinese names and descriptions as well as their fluctuating pattern of yin and yang attributes and relationship to the Eight trigrams. He also introduces the “Fate Stars” from the Chinese Almanac, noting there are 254 in total. Not to overwhelm the reader with so many “stars” to keep track of, this inclusion simply makes it obvious that the ancients were so skillfully observant, precision-oriented, and technical that it’s obvious they were working with an advanced system and far from being “superstitious.” Superstition implies accepting things without much introspection or investigation into cause and effect.
With the author’s special skill set in etymology, it is obvious that he enjoys explaining the roots of Chinese words and concepts, revealing the non-obvious subtext. One example is the 2 star, called the Great Door, and associated with the “dark (womb) Mother” or the Kun trigram. When you think about it, what “door” could be greater than that of the birthing mother, the giver of life?
Were I to comment on everything I agree with in this book, it would end up as a 50,000 word review. Instead, I prefer to point out concepts not mentioned routinely elsewhere, or things I question or disagree with. These differences of opinion create teachable moments and can expand the reader’s knowledge of varied approaches.
As a testimony to how powerful literal water is, Skinner notes that the more negative or “untimely stars” should be relegated to the “wet rooms.” The wet rooms include bathrooms, laundry facilities and the kitchen. Since every home has untimely stars, it’s best to design a floor plan where they occupy less-important rooms. The author here acknowledges a concept that the water which runs through these “wet rooms” can remove the negative influences from the premises. No doubt, this principle gave birth to the modern-day obsession with the location of toilets.
The author takes the time to explain the astronomical origins of the star references and why they have different names and colors than the more popular descriptions, where the stars are more directly associated with the trigrams. For example, “2 Black” is also related to the 2 Kun trigram, an earth trigram, which also lends to earth colors like brown and yellow. Without this explanation, self-study students may get confused with the assignment of different colors.
Skinner sets the scene for how the stars and their influences change over time, passing through timely and untimely phases and he also brings attention to the Period star and how that alone can reveal the enduring influence on occupants over the entire 180-year cycle that all structures go through. As a welcome relief after describing the mostly negative influences of the stars, Skinner writes, “Don’t worry, although this sounds like a real disaster catalog, whether or not these things begin to happen depends on a number of things. These include configuration of your home and the interaction of specific locations…the activities that take place there, the surrounding landforms, and interactions between the Stars. Also, even the worst Stars are ineffective if you do not stir them up.” This is incredibly important for beginners to know in advance.
In Chapter Six, Skinner explains how a floor plan can be divided up into either pie-shaped directional sectors or the boxy Nine Palace grid method. In his example of how to place the flying star chart over two different orientations, he uses the same flying star chart, which is misleading, if not incorrect. In Figure 6.7 on page 81, he uses a south sitting Period 7 chart. Next to it, he displays a tilted chart, presumably still sitting south and with the same flying stars. But almost no houses “sit” (back side) to a pointed corner of the floor plan. In fact, one of the defining features of the sitting side is the longest flat wall. If the bottom of the page is supposed to be the invisible “street” side (facing), then the second chart on the right would more likely be sitting southwest or southeast and have a completely different flying star chart.
What would have made the illustration clearer would have been several charts drawn differently on the page overlayed on an actual floor plan, each sitting south, but depicted with a facing arrow sign, just to emphasize that it doesn’t matter how you present a floor plan on a page, as long as you have the correct directions noted on the plan. For example, many architects like to put the facing side of a house toward the top of their blueprints.
The floor plan is an aerial view, so it could be shown coming from any direction. This is like the Chinese map arbitrarily placing south on the top. South is still south as you know it.
Skinner gives the pros and cons for using the Nine Palace Grid method versus the pie shape directional sectors. As someone who started out using the Nine Palace method and then switched exclusively to the pie shape method, I don’t feel his arguments in favor of the Nine Palace method hold up. They are simply not as convincing as the pie shape. For example, he notes that the pie shape method is more exacting with the directions, but he lists one of the “cons” that “it is not traditional.” Just because something was done first (traditional) doesn’t make it correct. People used to think that Earth was flat, and for a long time (accepted traditional thinking), but it was not correct.
He also presents a weak argument that the pie shape method looks awkward, slicing through rooms at angles. These angles are just as much the notional “straight lines” as the boxy Nine Palace method, but he seems to prefer the “look” of the zones when they conveniently line up similarly with actual walls. He feels that the walls truly enclose the boundaries of the sectors and if a room is 90% one sector, then you can consider the whole room to have the larger zone take over the whole room. This concept is also presented in Eva Wong’s feng shui book, A Master’s Course in Feng Shui.
While I do believe that walls are less permeable than open space, I happen to think that the Qi can move through walls. In fact, the annual, monthly, daily and hourly stars are moving from outside to inside with relative ease. While no one else has ever suggested this; the only other possibility (if the flying stars cannot move through walls) would be if the annual, monthly, daily and hourly stars are all preloaded in each directional zone and only “manifest” like popped corn, when their due time requires they become activated.
Chapter Seven’s Room by Room Analysis is very thorough, emphasizing the importance of certain areas of the house over other areas and he gives examples of which stars best suit the function of various rooms. In the section on the Entrance, he makes one odd suggestion: to “seal up the existing front entrance” if a secondary entrance has better flying stars. I don’t really believe he means to literally seal up the entrance, but maybe he does! From my experience, it would simply be enough to not use the less favorable entrance. You would not even need to put anything in front of the closed door to signal that it is no longer in use (or ushering in bad energy).
In the Living Room section, he refers to it as “the heart of the home” and that was likely true for a long time, figuratively, until relatively recently. The living room used to be a major family gathering spot with only one television in that room for all to watch together. Sometimes the “Heart” of the Home is a reference to the geometric center, so I mention that to avoid confusion.
From “heart” to “hearth,” Skinner has a whole section on the kitchen, as well as the placement of the stove, in particular. I like that his very British self refers to some of the notions surrounding stoves as “twaddle.” He does mention the relevance of having certain appliances not too close to each other as potential violations of Yin-Yang or Five Element Theory. I consider even that mostly “twaddle” from the perspective of the modern kitchen and the LACK of actual cooking that takes place in our hurried, ultra-processed food lives.
While providing a lot of insight about the best and worst rooms for certain flying stars, it’s bound to make the reader a bit uptight about the actual limitations we deal with, whether assessing an existing home or even with the great fortune to use feng shui in the design phase.
He notes that the 3 star (potential for arguments) is not good in a living room. This implies that family arguments could break out in that very room, which can be true. However, if one were to sleep in the 3 star energy, they absorb it and can then take that energy anywhere else in the house to start an argument. One could even sleep all night in the 3 star and then take that argumentative energy outside the home to work as well.
Skinner mentions that the untimely 5 star is not good anywhere, but to my surprise he actually suggests using the 5 star for a little feng shui jiu jitsu, as with intentionally placing an adversary in that location to gain the upper-hand. With two people sharing the 5 star- afflicted room, it is beyond the scope of this review to explain how to direct the 5 sha only to the adversary. Perhaps he means that you can make your adversary stew in a Waiting Room with the 5 star, before they meet with you to negotiate in another location. I would do that if I were a divorce attorney and put my client’s soon-to-be ex in the “sha” tank just for kicks and giggles.
Skinner breaks down the process of how to evaluate an apartment within a larger building and then a singular room within the apartment. He uses the same flying star chart for all, from macro-to-micro, same orientation. He writes that “Ch’i will not stop to ask if a wall is a legal boundary between two unrelated families,” such as the wall that might divide one neighbor’s kitchen from the other neighbor’s bedroom. He feels that if all tenants share the same lobby entrance to the building that all apartment units can be treated like rooms in the same house. This is logical and I know other practitioners who follow this protocol.
In my own practice, I deem every room in the house as a smaller version of the whole house, regardless of where each room’s door is located or the direction of the main views in each room. However, when it comes to individual apartments, I make a distinction in their orientation. I happen to believe that Qi has intelligence and that it definitely interacts with the individual in a very personal way. This is why the 4 star can help a writer get published, but for another person the 4 star instigates sexual infidelity. The author even highlights the personal relationship that one can have with a flying star in a later chapter.
The Qi understands when it is contracting or expanding with remodeling, so it’s not a stretch for me to take the counter view that individual apartments can have their own orientation, distinct from the building. I do get positive feedback reading the floor plan this way. All that being said, there could likely be an overlay where both charts ring true.
Just before Skinner gets into the mechanics of drawing up a Flying Star chart, he reiterates that the Flying Star School is influenced by the exterior world, with San He School principles very much applicable to the stars. He shares less-known information about how the shape of literal mountains have a unique impact on the internal stars, and he reminds readers that there needs to be beauty in the applications, such as creating a lovely, intentional landscape with the virtual mountain, instead of just a quick delivery of a pile of dirt or a cinder block wall. He emphasizes more than once that even with the four major house types having their known influence, interior remedies will not be as effective without the exterior “forms” present or added.
Skinner focuses mostly on the permanent stars, created when the structure is built, but he also provides brief explanations and Table Charts for annual, monthly, daily, and even hourly stars. He defines the Period of the house, based on when the roof goes on and cautions that the Period of a house does not change with renovations unless there is at least a partial roof replacement. I want to add that not only must the roof be removed, but also the ceiling, so that rays of sunshine penetrate in the house.
He mentions that some practitioners calculate a house based on when the occupants move in, postulating that this variation has sprung up in modern times because people generally change houses much more often than they used to. If just the human Qi is so powerful to change the Period chart, what does that say about the lingering influence of past occupants?
Skinner uses mostly Period 7 and Period 8 chart examples because of when the book was written, but he reminds readers that there are timely and untimely phases for all the stars throughout the nine Periods. As readers wade through the charts and calculations, he lists the priority areas: Facing sector, main door location, Sitting sector, and any directional sector where the outside forms will activate the energies inside. This is a different overlay to metabolize compared to the priority list of internal rooms, just based on their usage, such as bedrooms and home office ranking highest in priority.
The author highlights the hierarchy of the stars, such as the pairing of the Water Dragon and the Mountain Dragon, but there are reasons to also compare the Period Star with each of those stars and he introduces the concept of the “Guest” and “Host” principle. As Skinner goes over the meanings of the star combinations, I do agree with 90% of his descriptions and recommendations, but there are a few remarks that I question. For example, he notes the combative influence of the 6-7 star combination, also called “clashing swords.” He suggests using fire, the dominating element, without suggesting (until the very end of the book) that in many instances using the reductive element of water would be more harmonious.
He notes that the 5 star can be an irritant to any star it is paired with and he uses the 2-5 combination as one of the most critical. Even in Period 9, when the 2 star becomes more positive, the 2 star is still vulnerable to manifesting negatively when saddled with the 5 star. Skinner also brings in yet another star, which is the personal “gua” (kua) of the occupant. Here he instructs in the conventional calculations for a separate male and female trigram (gua).
He gives the example that the 1-1 (double water) combination could be positive for a 3 or 4 Wood star person, precisely because Water nurtures Wood in the Productive cycle of the Elements. This is a departure from the typical Eight Mansion (Ba Zhai) approach where East and West Group people have their respective four good and four bad directions, without factoring in the resident flying stars.
Here is an example of this approach: Let’s say you have two kids and one is a Zhen Wood trigram and the other child is the Dui-Metal trigram. Let’s say that there are two bedrooms for the kids, one in the south sector of the house and one in the west sector. Just based on the Eight Mansion School, this would be a simple decision, to place the East Zhen kid in the South room and the West Dui kid in the West room. Instead, Skinner asks you to look at the mountain star (dragon) in each bedroom and see if it nurtures the child’s personal trigram. If it happens that the West sector has the 1-4 combination, it might be a good room for the East type kid, since 1 water nurtures 3 Zhen Wood. Likewise, if the South Room has the 8-6 combination, we might see where the 8 earth star in the mountain dragon position could be good for the West-Metal kid, in spite of it being in an East Group part of the house.
Skinner offers a few folk cures, such as using a red string wrapped around six traditional Chinese metal coins to exhaust the ill effects of the 2 star. The metal makes sense as reductive to the 2 earth Qi. The red string is actually counter-productive, but in all reality, both the red string and the coins would be much more symbolic than anything else. When you need metal, you need POUNDS of metal for it to really work in the average sized room. Even though Stephen Skinner’s training and experience in Feng Shui is solidly traditional, classical, and authentic, he can still slide back and forth with the more “transcendental” and mystical treatments, given his knowledge of magic, talismanic practices and the occult.
Another surprising comment was in the entry for the 7-9 stars. He writes that the 9 (fire) helps control the worst “excesses” of the untimely 7 star. This is a surprise, when earlier in the book he correctly states that the 9 star is an amplifier and will intensify (for good or bad) whatever the 9 star joins. Equally, when one star is being dominated by another, it can bring out the worst of that star’s traits. This is similar to the intensity of the 5 star and whatever other star it joins. Ultimately, I think it is good for any feng shui student to have a look at the flying star lists from several sources and compare their similarities and differences.
Just as a personal aside, I spent my foundational years of feng shui during Period 7 and in the Los Angeles area. My experience with the 4 star may have been quite different from other practitioners elsewhere in the country or world. I adopted a kinder view of the untimely 4 star than others since I saw it help so many creative entertainment industry people excel with the aid of the 4 star.
When Skinner touches on the daily stars, he instructs in how the daily stars follow an ascending order from the December Solstice to the June Solstice and then flip to a descending order from June back to December. The only challenge with this is that the exact day and hour of the solstices varies slightly from year to year. If you are off by one day, you are off for all the daily stars. It should also be stated that almost no one does remedies on daily stars. This would be crazy-making. Instead, knowledge of a daily star could help make a decision for activities to pursue or avoid that day.
The author includes some of the most well-known Special Chart types, but he mentions that their specialness cannot be realized without the use of the exterior forms. For example: the Period 7 Double Facing House was not truly Double Facing in Period 7 without having both mountain and water outside on the facing side to support that house type. Similarly, he discusses the Pearl String Chart and the 3 Period Chart as being very lucky, but only if all directional zones exist in the floor plan. In other words, you can’t have a Pearl String house if there is a missing sector from an odd-shaped floor plan.
Skinner correctly explains that a house cannot be in a long termed (20 year) Locked Phase within the current Period it was built in. It is mathematically impossible. And yet, he doesn’t mention that there are annual locked phases which can occur within the same Construction Period of the house. Nor does he give out the biggest and easiest remedy for the locked phase, which is to hear and see circulating water.
His chapter on “Wild Stars” includes the Fate Stars from the Chinese Almanac, where we see the merging of these good and bad days, along with bad directions to be aware of in terms of demolitions, remodeling, digging, or even the scheduling of certain events and obligations. Traditionally, one could see a blending of time and direction in these calendars, such as a bad day to attend a funeral and the advice to not face the grave if it is in a bad direction, like the “Grand Duke” (Tai Sui) for the year.
His closing chapter on the remedies hits important points, such as:
- The real element is more potent than the colors or symbols associated with the element
- The reductive element should be used before a dominating element is considered
- Avoid placing the element too close to the border of another directional zone, so as not to have the wrong influence
- Sometimes the correct placement of one or two elements is all that is needed and only an amateur will be obsessed with remedying every single space and with minute details
- He also mentions “the inactivity remedy,” which means you just keep a negative zone “quiet” or leave it unused if possible
In giving examples of the raw elements, he keenly notes that Wood can be represented with hydroponic plants. This avoids the “muddying” (all puns intended) of using a potted plant which is a mixture of wood and earth. He also notes that when using color for water that black is more effective than dark blue, even though Western decorators might shy away from black for all its seriousness.
Skinner also explains, like no other, the origins of the use for the 6-rod metal wind chime, the reason for using hollow versus solid chimes, and rods with varying lengths to produce the perfect pentatonic notes. He concludes that no matter where in the world someone lives, human problems and priorities are similar: with money, health, love and kids being prime issues to resolve.
His Appendices have some very useful charts and information, including a brief discussion of an alternative way to divide up the 180-year cycle of the Flying Stars. Virtually everyone uses the evenly divided 9 Periods of 20 years each. This has stirred up controversy in recent times by those who assume the 20 Year cycle is now incorrect if reliant on the 19-20 year Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. The alternative system assigns a number of years for each Period based on the trigram associated with the Period. It gives a value of six years for each yin line and 9 years for each yang line. And the trigram in reference comes from the less used Pre-Heaven Sequence. While I don’t use this system myself, it is something to consider; Nine Star Ki also has an “uneven” way to divide up its 81-Year “epochs” as well.
Flying Star Feng Shui: Change Your Energy Change Your Luck by Stephen Skinner in much more than just casual reading. It’s a densely instructional work for those who are studying authentic feng shui without a teacher, or as a useful adjunct to any other course of formal training. Published in 2003, the information is both advanced and practical and is also timeless.
Author: Kartar Diamond
Company: Feng Shui Solutions ®
From the Book Review Blog Series
