The Six Malefics: Why 擎羊 and 陀罗 Are Never Found Apart
Six stars with a reputation for trouble, and a placement logic that explains most of what they are supposed to mean before you read a single interpretation.
English material on Zi Wei Dou Shu is almost entirely about the fourteen main stars. The six that carry the ominous names — 擎羊, 陀罗, 火星, 铃星, 地空, 地劫 — are usually mentioned once, translated as 'the malefics', and left there.
That leaves out the most interesting part. These six are not scattered into the chart by some separate judgement about misfortune; they are placed by two pieces of counting, and the counting itself says most of what they mean. The reputation follows from the placement.
What the label is actually measuring
The word usually translated as 'malefic' is 煞. It does not mean evil or unlucky. It describes something sharp, abrasive or obstructive — the quality of a thing that cuts rather than supports. In chart terms these are placed where friction shows up, not where disaster is scheduled.
That distinction matters because it changes what you do with the information. A main star tells you what a life area is like. A 煞 star tells you where that area meets resistance, and resistance is often the more actionable of the two.
The two blades never separate
| Year stem | 禄存 Lu | 擎羊 Yang | 陀罗 Tuo |
|---|---|---|---|
| 甲 Jia | 寅 | 卯 | 丑 |
| 乙 Yi | 卯 | 辰 | 寅 |
| 丙 Bing | 巳 | 午 | 辰 |
| 丁 Ding | 午 | 未 | 巳 |
| 戊 Wu | 巳 | 午 | 辰 |
| 己 Ji | 午 | 未 | 巳 |
| 庚 Geng | 申 | 酉 | 未 |
| 辛 Xin | 酉 | 戌 | 申 |
| 壬 Ren | 亥 | 子 | 戌 |
| 癸 Gui | 子 | 丑 | 亥 |
擎羊 and 陀罗 are placed relative to 禄存, the star of steady income. 禄存 is fixed by the birth year stem alone — 甲 puts it in 寅, 乙 in 卯, and so on through the ten stems. 擎羊 then sits one square clockwise from it, and 陀罗 one square anticlockwise.
Read that again as a rule rather than a list. A blade is placed at each shoulder of 禄存. So any chart that has 禄存 in it has both of them, always, one square away on either side. There is no chart where 擎羊 appears without 陀罗.
That single fact explains why the pair is traditionally read as one pressure rather than two misfortunes. Wherever income and steady resource settle, there is a pair of abrasive stars immediately adjacent — the reading is not 'two bad placements' but 'the thing I rely on has something sharp on both sides of it'. Whether that is experienced as competition, as effort, or simply as the cost of holding on to a resource is where the interpretation begins.
The two fires follow the year
火星 and 铃星 work differently. Their starting square depends on the birth year branch, and then they count forward with the birth hour. Because the year branches come in four groups, there are only four starting configurations.
This means the fires are the one part of the six that depends on both the year and the hour, which is why two charts from the same year can put them far apart. It also means the fires move with the hour the same way the Body Palace does — the pair is sensitive to the one input people are most often missing.
The classical reading of 火星 and 铃星 is suddenness rather than severity: an abrupt change in the area they sit in, arriving without much warning. That is consistent with the placement. They are counted rather than measured, so they land wherever the count ends, which is a fair description of a star that is supposed to be about things happening suddenly.
Emptiness counted from 亥
| Birth hour | 地空 Kong | 地劫 Jie |
|---|---|---|
| 子 Zi | 亥 | 亥 |
| 丑 Chou | 戌 | 子 |
| 寅 Yin | 酉 | 丑 |
| 卯 Mao | 申 | 寅 |
| 辰 Chen | 未 | 卯 |
| 巳 Si | 午 | 辰 |
| 午 Wu | 巳 | 巳 |
| 未 Wei | 辰 | 午 |
| 申 Shen | 卯 | 未 |
| 酉 You | 寅 | 申 |
| 戌 Xu | 丑 | 酉 |
| 亥 Hai | 子 | 戌 |
地空 and 地劫 are the simplest of the six. Both start from 亥 at the hour of the Rat and count with the birth hour — but in opposite directions. 地劫 counts forward, 地空 counts backward.
The consequence is visible in the table. At the hour of the Rat they land in the same square. At the hour of the Horse they land together again. In between they move apart, reaching their greatest distance at Rabbit and Rooster, where they sit directly opposite each other. None of this is a rule that had to be written down; it follows from one counting forward and one counting backward.
The traditional meaning of the pair is loss and hollowing out — the sense that something expended here does not come back. Note that they depend only on the birth hour, so they are among the few placements you can establish from the hour alone.
Where the schools disagree
Three genuine disagreements are worth knowing about. The first is 地空 and 地劫: some lineages swap their directions, so the two stars trade places on every chart. The second concerns 火星 and 铃星 in the hours around midnight and noon, where the handedness of the counting changes in some texts but not others.
The third is about weight. One school treats a 煞 star as able to override a favourable main star in the same square; another treats it as a modifier that can never cancel the main star's reading, only colour it. This is the disagreement that produces the largest practical difference, and it is worth asking which convention a reading is using before comparing it with another.
What is not in dispute is the counting. 禄存 by year stem, the two blades one square either side, the fires by year group and hour, the empty pair by hour alone — every correct implementation agrees on those, and the calculator on this site computes them the same way the tables here show.