Folklore Friday: The Lo Shu Turtle

Hey guys, welcome to Learn Feng Shui, where you'll learn Feng Shui from a classical point of view taken out the myth and superstition. If you like weekly tips as well as fun folklore tales, you'll enjoy learning Feng Shui with me. Hey guys, welcome to Folklore Friday, today I'm going to be talking about the symbolism of the turtle. Hey guys, couple different ways to stay up to date on announcements. You can check the event page on the website, which is linked below, and it has all the upcoming events that way I don't have to just use my breath and talk about it at all, but there is events going on.

Another thing is you could join the Telegram Group and get updated from there, and I'll link that below also. Hey guys, today I want to talk about the symbolism of the turtle or the tortoise across Feng Shui and Chinese mythology and folklore. So today I'm going to be reading from a website called ThothAden.com. I'll put a link below. I like to read you all this story, it's a little bit easier to kind of read some other websites.

So here it says once upon a time, according to the ancient Chinese legend, there was a big flood in the area of the low river. This was about 3000 BC. So to calm the river god, the population offered sacrifices when a big turtle emerged from the river with the curious pattern on its shell. This is a magic square with a 3x3 grid in a circular dots or numbers were arranged, such that the sum of each number in the row column and diagonal was the same. It was 15.

You have to note that since ancient times turtles are considered mysterious and symbolic animals, they get very, very old and therefore embody immortality or at least longevity. Many cultures share the ideas that the earth lies on a large turtle and that the inhabited world is a cosmic turtle shell rising from the water. Hand in hand with the attribution of age comes wisdom. If a creature has lived so long and seen so much and heard so much, it must have drawn a great deal of knowledge from all of those experiences. After all, in addition, turtles are considered to be stable, calm and thoughtful.

In ancient China, the turtle symbolism was like one compared its shell to the frontament and under side with the flat disk of the earth. So the turtle became the symbol for the universe itself. For wisdom, eternity and knowledge, thus it hardly surprises the savants of that time, immediately recognized the message of universal harmony and the magic square in the backside of the low shoe turtle. From there, it was in short set to understand the duality of Yin and Yang in the natural flow of Qi and helped develop the system of the five phases and the eight chargrants, all together representing the principles of reality and defining the fundamental knowledge of Taoist cosmology, including Feng Shui, the YiJing and traditional Chinese medicine, just to name a few systems. So I'm going to read a little bit from this article on this first calm.

So this is a really popular website and they actually have really good articles. They have a ton of Feng Shui consultants that actually write articles for them. Most of them are more geared towards BTP and Western Feng Shui. So again, if you practice BTP, you can go ahead and check those out. Even some of their so-called classical Feng Shui is a little bit Westernized in their articles, but they are easy to follow and again they are credited consultants that write those articles.

So if that's what you practice, I definitely go and recommend checking out the Feng Shui articles on this spruce. So here it says history. The low shoe or there's a couple of different spellings is sometimes called the magic square. It is also at the root of ancient Feng Shui astrology and the flying star school called Xuan Kong as well as the YiJing, of course. As the story goes, an ancient master drive that was in from a turtle that had a magic square pattern on its back.

And by reading those patterns he saw into the deeper pattern of natural rhythms or a law of the universe as was expressed in this low shoe square. There are several different stories, but basically again a turtle emerged from the river that had an unusual three by three pattern on its shell which became the basis of the low shoe. It had a mathematical grid where the sum of the numbers in each row column or a diagonal is the same. So it's kind of like a Sudoku with nine boxes if you think about it that way. Basically no matter which direction you add the numbers horizontal vertical or diagonal they will always add up to 15.

So number 15 is considered a powerful number because of course, it's one of the days in each of the 24 solar cycles those G Chi cycles guys that talk about all the time. In other words, it is a number of days in which a cycle moves from the new moon to the full moon. So again, this kind of goes a little bit with flying square, sorry flying stars not flying squares squares always remain the same with the numbers and the stars fly around to each area. So in the low shoe the number five is in the center with odd and even numbers alternating in its periphery. So the four numbers 246 and eight are at the four corners of the square with the odd ones one three five and seven forming across in the center.

So you can just Google any sort of like low shoe turtle you know image and you'll be able to find it. And again, I'll link the article because I did think this was a really good article. You can see how the Feng Shui Boggwa evolved from the low shoe square especially if you know that China. They placed the south on top of their maps. So the number nine is at the south area of the Boggwa and the one is at the north, which is at the bottom and the odd numbers are considered a Yang quality and even the numbers carry in energy.

So in the low shoe square, in and Yang numbers alternate around its number with number five being in the center. So where the symbolism of the tortoise actually comes from is that in land form Feng Shui in the original use of Feng Shui was very much oriented to your environment. And of course back then the ancient people like to be protected by mountains. You know they needed a good spot near them that had of course water running and you know water flow and clean water source if you didn't have that. I mean you couldn't live.

You know so there was very much some specific things you would look for when you were looking to establish a home or establish a village. You know there's certain land for you would look for. And one of those things they're called the celestial guardians and they are named after different animals. And what they refer to really is the land form around your space which is really warm mountains and water are seen. So ideally you would have a nice mountain behind you offering up support and protection from the elements and they would refer to this as the tortoise.

And you know tortoises don't really move a whole lot they're very sturdy and stable so they refer to these mountains as tortoises. And so again that kind of translated to the superstition a little bit of you know you can place a tortoise somewhere. So I think if you some people really like tortoises they like the way they look and you know I think it's a good reminder and it's a good symbology. If you want to you know put one out and you want to have that daily reminder just of stability and you know purpose maybe even slowing down of her people say it represents kind of slowing down and taking stock of some things. So if you want to be reminded of that I think it's worth as a good symbol to place out but remember it doesn't replace the natural land form which is that mountain behind you.

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