The relationships line: five rooms about other people

Five rooms, one you

Five of the twelve palaces talk directly about other people: Siblings, Spouse, Children, Friends and Parents. Together with the Life Palace in the middle, they make up your map of relationships.

Their positions on the chart are telling too. The Parents and Siblings Palaces sit right on either side of the Life Palace, elders on one side and peers on the other, with you in between. Spouse and Children follow after Siblings. The Friends Palace sits right next to the Travel Palace, grouped with "being out in the world".

The names in the classics

In the "An Shi Er Gong Li" in volume two of the *Quan Shu*, the Spouse Palace is called "Wives and Concubines" and the Friends Palace "Servants", written from the point of view of a male head of household in that era. Later books mostly call them the Spouse Palace and the Subordinates Palace, and today the latter has become the Friends Palace, shifting from household servants to peers: friends, coworkers and teams. The names have changed; the positions haven't.

What each one looks at

• Parents Palace: parents and elders, extending to teachers and bosses, and how you get along with rules and institutions.
• Siblings Palace: brothers and sisters, and the peers closest to you: roommates, business partners, coworkers you know well.
• Spouse Palace: how you love, your habits in a relationship, and the kind of person you're drawn to. It has nothing to do with your partner's gender or whether you're married.
• Children Palace: children, and by extension the people and things you bring up: juniors, staff, students, your own work.
• Friends Palace: friends, coworkers and people in your circles, and how you lead a team.

The rooms opposite

Every cell has an opposite palace directly across from it, and each room on the relationships line has its counterpart:

• Siblings faces Friends: the people closest to you and the wider circle, one inner, one outer.
• Spouse faces Career: love and work often pull on each other.
• Children faces Property: the people you bring up, and the home you keep.
• Parents faces Health: the pressure that comes from above, and how you carry it.

The ancients read these differently from Xingge

When volume two of the *Quan Shu* discusses the Siblings Palace, it counts "how many" siblings you'll have; for the Wives and Concubines Palace, it says whether marrying early or late is better. That's reading these cells as predictions about other people.

Xingge doesn't read them that way. Practitioners tend to see it like this: these rooms describe how you are in your relationships, not other people's fate. A warm, passionate star in your Spouse Palace doesn't say what your partner will be like; it says you tend to throw yourself warmly into close relationships. For one thing, family life today looks very different from five hundred years ago. For another, many people are born in the same double-hour, so using one chart to judge someone else's life was always going to miss.

Putting it to use

Pick a relationship where you feel stuck, find the matching cell, and see which stars live there. If you keep clashing with your manager, for example, look at the Parents Palace. If it holds a star that sticks to rules and likes to check things, maybe you're naturally sensitive to authority, and you hear a simple reminder as a rejection. Seeing it this way is more useful than just blaming the other person.

The same cell can also show you your strengths. Someone with a loyal, big-hearted star in the Siblings Palace is often the friend everyone calls to help them move. Knowing that tells you where your goodwill with people comes from, and when it's time to say no.