The Magic Square Underneath

The grid Flying Star uses is not an arbitrary arrangement. It is the luoshu, the three by three square holding the numbers one to nine in which every row, every column and both diagonals add to fifteen. Chinese tradition receives it as a pattern seen on the shell of a turtle emerging from the river Luo, and it appears across Chinese cosmological writing as the numerical plan of the nine palaces, the eight directions and the centre.

Schuyler Cammann's study of the magic square of three in Chinese philosophy and religion traces how the figure was used and what was claimed for it, and shows that its religious career is older and wider than any single divinatory method built on it. The same square underlies other arts of the same family: the nine palace schemes that Ho Peng Yoke examines in his account of Chinese mathematical astrology use it as their board.

Recognising that inheritance places Flying Star correctly. It is not a self contained system of house reading that happens to use numbers, but one application of a numerical cosmology that Chinese thought had already put to work in ritual, in statecraft and in several kinds of divination. The flying of the stars is the luoshu made to turn, and what a practitioner is reading is a very old diagram in motion.