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Sinuous and Straight

Feng-shui, to the Westerner, is one of those typically Chinese puzzles. The word itself, although literally it means 'wind-water', is meaningless as a description of anything. It is, say the Chinese themselves, 'a thing like wind, which you cannot comprehend, and like water, which you cannot grasp'. At one end of the scale it seems little more than an inchoate mass of superstitions to do with luck and ancestor worship; but at the same time it is a highly complex system of town and country planning whose results are in close accord with Western principles of aesthetics and environmental hygiene. The manipulation of Feng-shui, and the selection of sites with the most favourable Feng-shui for a client and his purposes, formed a major current in Chinese thought and practice for many centuries, and probably still continues (though in a covert fashion) under the new more materialistic dynasty. The strangest and most important thing is that, as a system of geomantic planning, it worked: for the Chinese landscape is said to be one of the most – if not the most – consistently beautiful and harmonious landscapes in the world.

A large part of the landscape was made more harmonious in the distant past – certainly before 1000 BC – by subtle modification with earthworks and other structures. In some cases a pointed hill has had its tip sliced off, to form a small dome or plane; on others, originally flat-topped, pointed mounds (later replaced by pagodas) were added to change the outline. Water-courses were eased into gentle curves, trees and forests planted, earthworks and embankments raised – and all this not just for the sake of some abstract idea of 'beauty', but in the belief that to do so would definitely improve the health and fortunes of the people living there. The forms of nature, they believed, had been improved so as to improve the 'breath of nature'.

We can see that in one sense at least they were right, if we take Feng-shui in its literal sense of 'wind-water'. A south-facing slope, well-drained and with plenty of sun, and sheltered by mountains to ensure a good circulation of air, would be regarded as ideal by any Western architect; it would certainly encourage good health in anyone and anything living there. As far as people were concerned, it could quite possibly improve their fortunes and 'luck', for a large part of what is often called 'luck' is not only being in the right place at the right time, but the ability to recognise that you're there at the right time. That, to some extent at least, requires a mental alertness that can only come with good physical health. Health and fortunes do go together.

But the Chinese did not arrive at their definition of a 'good' site by observation, as the Westerner would have done; instead, they reached it by a complex system of allegory, analogy, astrology, numerology, geometry and heaven only knows what else. It was, and is, far too complex a system to memorise: in practice the Chinese geomancers relied on a tool called the 'geomantic compass', which was an ordinary compass surrounded by anything from sixteen to thirty-eight rings of symbols for the various aspects of Feng-shui, to pick out the harmonies and discordances in the landscape as predicted by Feng-shui. The complete system is fascinating, and its analogies and correspondences have many parallels with the medieval alchemy and astrology of Europe; but for the purposes of our study, and our search for a new understanding of nature, we only need look at some of its aspects.[1] The two which I think are particularly relevant to our study are, first, the way in which forms in the landscape are given specific attributes and functions; and second, the underlying and central concept of the 'breath of nature'.

In Feng-shui, forms in the landscape are given both symbolic and allegorical attributes. At the first level, different 'elements' are assigned to different shapes of hill, and the inter-relationship of these elements is deemed to be one of the factors that determines the health and fortune of the area around and beneath those hills. The Chinese elements are not quite the same as their Western counterparts: they are earth, fire, water, wood and metal, as opposed to Western earth, air, fire, and water. The Chinese elements, as in Europe, have a vast number of 'correspondences': for example, a pointed hill has not just the attributes of the element fire, but also, through correspondence, the attributes of the planet Mars, the season of summer, the southern cardinal point, hot weather, and all manner of other things, including its allegorical representation as the red bird, or phoenix.

A flattened-off peak is wood, or Jupiter, and should ideally be to the east of the chosen site; a wavy ridge is water, or Mercury, and should be to the north; a rounded dome is metal, or Venus, and should be to the west; and the element earth, or Saturn, is represented by a steep-sided plateau, which should be near the centre of the area. Some relationships of hills are mutually constructive, others are destructive, and others have no great effect one way or the other. For example: to build a house by a flattened-off peak standing close to and above a sharp peak – fire below wood, in Feng-shui's terms – is to invite trouble from fire. The geomancer would suggest that you abandon the site unless you don't mind your house being burnt down repeatedly; but if you can't abandon it, you could reduce the risk by rounding off the fire-peak to a wavy ridge to change its attribution to water, or else by building a wavy-topped tower – a water-tower in several senses – between your house and the fire-peak.

This interaction is made still more complex by the planetary and seasonal attributes of the elements, for they cause the relative strengths of the various hills to wax and wane with the seasons and the positions of the planets. This is where astrology and numerology come into Feng-shui, but we don't need to deal with them here.

If all the combinations are bad at a particular time, Feng-shui predicts that they will coincide with a particular misfortune at that time – the interactions of the attributes don't so much cause misfortune as occur in exact parallel with it. For example, fire is at its weakest in winter, while water is at its strongest: so while, in summer, all will seem well with the combination of a sharp fire-peak next to a ridged water-peak, in winter the water-peak will become dominant, damping the fire of your children's lives and leading to their death in youth. Fire over metal leads to natural disasters; metal over wood leads to wasting away and injury; and so on. But if you know this beforehand, you do have a choice about what may happen to you. 'It is the boast of the Feng-shui system', wrote the Reverend Eitel in the 1870s, 'that it teaches man how to rule nature and his own destiny by showing him how heaven and earth rule him.... It is left in great measure to man's foresight and energy to turn his fortunes into any channel he pleases, to modify and regulate the influences which heaven and earth bring to bear upon him.'

This freedom to choose the best possible site for your own purposes, combined with the traditional Chinese belief in the ability of one's ancestors to guide one's fortunes as they pleased, led to some interesting lawsuits in the later more decadent phase of Feng-shui practice. Brothers often hired different geomancers to choose sites for their father's tomb so as best to suit the aspirations and ambitions of that brother; where the geomancers picked out different sites – which they often did – the father would remain unburied, sometimes for years, while the brothers fought over which site should be used. This is not, however, the aspect of Feng-shui which concerns us here: it is the energy aspect which is more relevant to the model of nature that we seem to be developing from our earlier study of dowsing patterns in Britain.

This is where the allegorical form of the landscape and the 'breath of nature' come in. The five elements are seen as by-products of the interplay of the two great forces - opposed but complementary – known as Yin and Yang, and symbolised by the white tiger and blue dragon respectively. In addition to being seen in terms of the elements, the hills are also seen in terms of these two animals. Dragons are everywhere: a long ridge may be a dragon, and so may a cluster of small hills with a high mountain. Wherever there is a true dragon, there must also be a tiger: they are inseparable. There are also other allegorical descriptions of hills, such as a tortoise, or a bear, or an up-turned boat, and these all have meanings of their own; but these are tertiary influences, coming after the interplay of Yin and Yang and the five elements.[2]

The two forces are also known as the 'two breaths' or, in Chinese, Ch'i. (The five elements are secondary varieties of ch'i.) Yang is the masculine aspect, the creative inbreath; Yin is feminine, the dissolvent outbreath. If you happen to think that it's the males who do the destroying, and the females the creating, this still does make sense if you think of Yang as a force which tends towards a system of order, and Yin as a force which dissolves, under control, so that re-creation may take place. These two forces flow in currents around the countryside; the paths along which they travel may or may not have physical counterparts, but they definitely travel in winding paths, often following the contours. These paths are sometimes called 'lung mei' or 'dragon's veins'. In ordinary countryside, a 'good' site is one just beside a point where two mei, one of Yin, the other of Yang, cross each other; but the geomancer would prefer to follow these veins like a dowser following a water-line, 'riding the ch'i' as it is called, in the hope of finding a point where several mei carrying the ch'i gather together. Such a point, I think, is what we could call a sacred site.

At a concentration of mei, it's also important that the two forces should be in balance with each other, and that they should both gather at and disperse from that point evenly. Again, this is where the form of the landscape came into the system, for the ch'i was deemed to collect and disperse according to the form of the area. Sharp mountainous land was predominantly Yang, and undulating countryside Yin: a preferred site in each area would be a Yin plateau in a mountainous area, or a steep Yang hill in undulating pasture. An example of the former in Britain would be Castlerigg stone circle, on a flat clearing amidst mountains in Cumbria in northern England; while the classic example of the latter is Glastonbury Tor, rising steeply above the fenland and the Abbey below.

If the landscape is monotonously either Yin or Yang, all undulation or all mountains, it will have difficulty in 'breathing'; and flat country and hollows, says Eitel, 'do not breathe at all'. An unsheltered plateau is no use as a site, for the wind will blow the ch'i away; and fast-flowing water or steep ragged ridges will allow it to drain away too quickly to be of any use. In particular, straight lines of any kind in the landscape - whether natural or man-made – are an anathema, for they drain the ch'i away fastest of all.

This last may seem a little odd, if we are trying to compare Feng-shui with the energy system we seem to have in Britain, which consists of both sinuous underground energy courses and straight overground ones. The Chinese seem to have regarded sinuous as 'good', and straight as 'bad' or malefic: because of this some British writers have suggested that there is a sort of 'mirroring' between East and West as far as energy systems are concerned. This seems to be based on the assumption that the straight lines of the ley-system must be 'good', since they connect sacred sites to each other.[3] The answer to this, as we shall see, is that the energy system in Britain is more complex than just 'straight is good, bent is bad' – and so is Feng-shui. They're just not that simple.

Another important aspect of this concept of the 'breath of nature' is that it can be weakened in various ways, and even 'poisoned'. The two ch'i, as long as they are in balance, will tend to produce health and fertility at the sites where they meet; but they are, like the secondary ch'i of the five elements, subject to cyclical changes in relative strengths, which can throw them off balance at times. The geomancer would aim to predict those times by the way the currents seem to be moving, and by the direction in which the associated dragon- and tiger-hills are facing. The geomancer also has to beware of certain types of countryside, such as marshland, stagnant water, scree and other 'rotten' rocks, for they can change the whole character of the ch'i as it passes through them, poisoning it so that it becomes sha or, literally, 'noxious exhalations' – a fair description of the smell of stagnant water. But sha goes further than just a bad smell, for it operates destructively at every level that ch'i operates, killing people and livestock, ruining their health and their fortunes, causing premature decay. And as we shall see, there is an exact parallel of sha to be found in aspects of the energy-patterns in Britain.

But Feng-shui, as a system of geomancy, is not directly comparable with those hints of an ancient system of geomancy that we've seen in Britain. For a start, Feng-shui deals essentially with the shape and form of the countryside, with little concern for stones or sacred sites: China never seems to have had a megalithic culture like that which produced the British standing stones and henges, and its use of mounds and pagodas, in a geomantic sense, seems to have been limited to modifying the elemental attributes of hills. But if we scale up another Chinese system – acupuncture – to landscape dimensions, and combine it with Feng-shui, we would have a system of geomancy that closely resembles what we can see of the megalithic geomancy in Britain. In a system of earth-acupuncture, there could hardly be a more obvious 'needle' than a standing stone.

In acupuncture theory, the body's physical and physiological processes – blood circulation, absorption of oxygen in breathing, digestion of food, information-transmission in the nerves, and so on -are all controlled and directed by the interplay of Yin and Yang and the five elements, operating in a semi-physical or non-physical way in the body. Yin and Yang and the five elements are deemed to be 'above' the ordinary processes of the body. The interplay takes place throughout the body, but it is particularly accessible on or just beneath the surface of the body – so it is on the surface, or just beneath it, that all acupuncture operations take place.

This surface movement of Yin and Yang shows itself as some kind of energy flowing through 'veins' or 'meridians' which can be plotted out on the surface of the body. (These 'veins' are not blood-veins, by the way: in Chinese the term for them is 'mei', the same term as in Feng-shui, and these acupuncture-mei are deemed to work in much the same way as the mei of Feng-shui.) Different schools of acupuncture define different numbers of meridians in the body, but there seems to be some agreement that there are twelve major meridians, and any number of minor ones from thirty upwards. Each major meridian is associated with a major organ in the body, and is said to control the function of that organ.[4]

In addition to the twelve organ meridians there are a number of other meridians of varying importance, which control the remaining body processes and the interaction of each meridian with the body as a whole. So far as Chinese medicine is concerned, the body is a network of energies interacting at a number of levels. While these energies permeate every cell of the body, they appear to concentrate in these mei or meridians at the body's surface. As we have seen in our brief look at Feng-shui, this can be said as much of the body of the earth as of a human body.

As long as the energy-flow through the meridians remains in balance, or at least close to balance, the body will function 'normally'; but any disruption of the energy-flow, producing an excess or shortage of energy at some point, will lead to ill-health. Some imbalances occur cyclically, a sort of astronomically-linked tide-like surging: this too is normal, but it can lead to problems in the diagnosis of which part of which meridian is disrupting the normal pattern of balance during ill-health. Each meridian has a number of nodal points along its course – less than ten in some meridians, more than forty in others - which seem to act, to give an analogy, like valves or sluice-gates to control the energy-flow. It is on these nodal points – the 'acupuncture-points' – that most acupuncture therapy takes place.

Although by tradition acupuncture points are more symbolic than physically real, they have recently been found to coincide with abnormally large skin cells that happen also to have a much lower electrical skin resistance than the surrounding cells.[5] In a Kirlian-type electrophotograph of the skin they flare out like flaming torches by comparison with the rest of the skin. Some Western theorists have assumed from this that acupuncture therapy is solely electrical or electrostatic in nature,[6] but I'm certain that there's far more to it than just electrostatics. Western medicine is based on Western science, and our science is highly prone to what one writer has dubbed the 'nothing-but' mistake:[7] one example that we met earlier was John Taylor's assumption that any energy field around standing stones could be 'nothing but' electromagnetism. Electromagnetism comes into it, as does electrostatics into acupuncture: but there's more to the energies of standing stones and acupuncture than that.

Through practical experience, the Chinese discovered not just the acupuncture-points, but also the particular area or problem to which each point relates. Few of them relate in any obvious way with the area which they are supposed to control, but some do tally with Western observations: for example, the common observation that a pain running from the middle of the chest to the little finger coincides with a particular heart disease, angina pectoris, tallies with the acupuncture statement that the heart meridian runs from the little finger to the top of the arm, and there connects with the middle of the chest. There are, however, a large number of acupuncture points which can be worked on to relieve various types of heart complaint; only five of these are on the Heart Meridian, and none is at its end, the little finger. Acupuncture therapy is not simple, by any means.

As far as acupuncture is concerned, problems arise from disruptions of the energy-flow, either through blockage or leakage, or for some other reason. One type of blockage comes from bruising or scarring, and an example that one text-book I read gave should illustrate the difficulty of diagnosis in acupuncture. Westerners tend to assume that the site of any pain is also the site of the trouble that causes it: but even in Western medicine it's recognised that this is only sometimes true. The example in the text-book was of a woman who came to the acupuncturist complaining of nausea and headaches, inflammation of the eyes and pains under the rib-cage – as you can see, there's no obvious connection between her symptoms. But after careful questioning it transpired that she had broken her ankle a short time before; this had been treated, and didn't hurt, so it hadn't seemed relevant to her when she was describing her symptoms. According to acupuncture theory, though, this was highly relevant, for scar tissue round such a break would block the energy-flow of a meridian that led through the rib-cage, round the back and the side of the head, and ended under the eyes. Blockage at the base of this meridian would lead directly to the symptoms the woman described. Careful massage around the ankle reduced the scar tissue and the energy blockage, and everything returned to normal.

Massage is only one of the three main acupuncture techniques. The other two are the use of the well-known needles, inserted into selected acupuncture points; and the application of heat at selected points, either by heating an already-inserted needle, or by burning a cone of moxa (dried leaves of Mugwort) on the surface of the skin, removing the cone as soon as the heat is only just bearable. According to the type of manipulation and the relationship between the point of action and the patient's problem, these techniques can be used to reduce blockage or energy-flow, to supplement the energy or to drain away an excess: the same technique is used with only slight variation in each case.

Any technique can be used on almost any of the many acupuncture points, but certain points are 'forbidden' to needle techniques, others to the use of moxa; a few are forbidden to either needle or moxa, and one or two are forbidden to any technique at all. Sometimes there is an obvious physical reason – as in forbidding the use of moxa on one or two points directly below the eyes – whilst in other cases there seems to be no clear reason. This forbidding of the use of certain techniques at certain points has some interesting parallels  in what appears to be a system of earth-acupuncture in Britain.

Another major concern of the acupuncturist is with diet – and here again there is a correlation with Feng-shui, for the acupuncturist's approach to diet is based on the same concept of the interplay of the five elements, seen in diet as the five flavours. In acupuncture the element Wood is sour, Fire is bitter, Earth is sweet, Water is salty, and Metal hot, pungent or aromatic. As with the inter-relationships of the elemental shapes in Feng-shui, the inter-relationship of these elemental flavours is complex, and as before I can only give a brief summary here. Each flavour is said to enter the body through one of the five organs – liver, heart, spleen, lungs and kidneys – and to be the proper food for another; each has a particular overall effect on the body, is counteracted (if in excess) by one of the other flavours, and itself counteracts an excess of another.

Sweet things, for example, are said to enter the body through the spleen, and are the proper food for the liver; they have a harmonising effect; in excess they are counteracted by sour things, and themselves counteract an excess of salt. Whether this is true or not in terms of Western medicine is beside the point, for when used with the rest of the Chinese system of medicine it does work. I ought also to point out that the 'organs' are seen more as labels for functions rather than solely the physical organs that Western medicine recognises; the labels 'spleen' and the like are the only practical Western translations for what were probably more generalised labels in the original Chinese.

So we can summarise the principles of acupuncture as the manipulation of energy-flow - whatever that energy might be – by means of the insertion of a needle, or the application of heat or massage, at selected points on lines of concentration of that energy. This is combined with precise control of diet, seen in terms of the balanced interplay of the five elements. The energy-flow and the balance of the elements are both in a constant state of flux, partly due to their interaction with each other, and partly due to 'outside' influences. The outside influences include the inter-relationship of the two modes of the primal energy, Yin and Yang, in their various aspects as positive/negative, creative/dissolvent, masculine/feminine, Sun/Moon and the like; and also the interplay and the varying strengths of the elemental attributes of the five planets.

The parallels with Feng-shui are, I think, obvious: but the differences are important too. If we were to combine Feng-shui with a landscape-scale acupuncture, the energy-flow in the landscape could be controlled not just by shape – as in Feng-shui – but also by landscape-scale 'needles', landscape-scale heat, landscape-scale massage to reduce scars on the landscape. It's likely that a system of geomancy based more on acupuncture techniques than on shape would tend to show up the lung mei, the concentrations of the energy into lines or channels, more in terms of the nodes or points on those lines rather than the lines themselves; and it's also likely that there would be far more of these meridians or energy-lines on the body of the earth than on the body of a human, and that they would be laid out in far less obvious a way than in human acupuncture, for the simple reason that the landscape has no obvious organs and no obvious arms or legs or head.

As you will probably have recognised, this matches the picture of the landscape implied by our study of dowsing-patterns in Britain.

A system of geomancy that combined Feng-shui with acupuncture in this way would not be 'better' than Feng-shui on its own: it would simply be different. After all, it's still the same earth in each case, still the same energies, and even still the same concentrations of those energies: the techniques of operating upon those energies may vary, but then the techniques of building bridges – for example – may vary, though the results are still bridges, built to the same physical rules. The techniques may be different in the two approaches to geomancy, but they still operate through the same physical and not-so-physical rules.

From what I've read of Chinese geomancy, it seems unlikely that a combined system of this type was ever used in China. But it does seem likely that something close to it was used in the megalithic period and earlier in Britain, and possibly as late as the Middle Ages. Whether it was used deliberately or not, consciously or not, I do not know, and - some would say 'heresy!'- I do not particularly care: but the evidence for its existence and use seems to be there, and the parallels are certainly there.

British geomancy, if it did exist, would seem to have been a system of earth-acupuncture, with the sacred sites as acupuncture points on energy-channels both sinuous and straight, and with the standing stones and the like as massive needles of stone. And if that is the case, we now need to look again at those stones, with a rather different view: to put them to use, in the present rather than the past.

Notes

[1] For a more complete study of Feng-shui, see Eitel, Feng-shui, or Feuchtwang, Chinese Geomancy: the latter is more detailed and more up to date. Both have their limitations: Eitel's book suffers from Christian arrogance, particularly in its summary; and Feuchtwang's study is blinkered by current notions of anthropology. But if you can 'read between the lines', both books are useful in a study of the energy aspects of Feng-shui.

[2] See Chinese Geomancy, pp.151-71.

[3] See, in particular, two articles by Steve Moore in The Ley Hunter: Leys and Feng-Shui, in TLH 72, pp.11-13; and Mirroring, in TLH 73, pp.6-9.

[4] Mary Austin's Acupuncture Therapy is one acupuncture manual that usefully explains the practical aspects of acupuncture terms and theories.

[5] See Ostrander and Schroeder, Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain, pp.233-7.

[6] This is the impression given by almost all the articles on acupuncture that I've read in British medical journals, such as the Lancet, the British Medical Journal and World Medicine.

[7] See Edward de Bono, Practical Thinking, pp.94-6 and 118-24; see also the anonymous SSOTBME, p.17.

Copyright © 1978-98 Tom Graves

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