Gu Chen and Gua Su in BaZi: The Orphan Star and the Widow Star

A woman in her fifties came to me with a chart and one sentence. Every reader she had seen told her she would end up alone, and one of them had shown her 寡宿 in the spouse palace when she was in her twenties. She had married twice. Both marriages were good for about four years and then stopped being interesting to her. She asked whether the star could be taken out. I asked who she had been comparing the husbands to.

Gu chen and gua su are a pair of BaZi markers that sit one branch outside each of the four seasonal groups, the first where a season opens and the second where it closes, and the tradition reads both as a bond that ends rather than a character that fails. The chapter 論孤辰寡宿 in 三命通會, first printed in 1578, is a long one for a pair of loneliness stars: two derivations, a geometry, a list of conditions and three escape clauses.

Two words, two endings

The chapter begins with dictionary work rather than arithmetic. 老而無夫曰寡，㓜而無父曰孤. Old without a husband is 寡, the widow. Young without a father is 孤, the orphan. Then the short line that keeps the pair honest. 此其義也. That is what the words mean.

So the two stars are named after the same event at the two ends of a life. One is a child losing the person ahead of them, the other an adult losing the person beside them, and both describe a supply line that stops rather than a temperament that fails. Nobody in this chapter is born solitary.

Then the seats, which is the part I quote to clients. 寅為春始，辰為春末. 寅 opens spring and 辰 closes it. The sentence runs through the other three seasons and ends with a verdict. 皆陰陽支離之神，四時代謝之方. These are the branches where yin and yang pull apart, the places where one season hands over to the next.

The four opening branches are 寅, 巳, 申 and 亥, and the four closing branches are 辰, 未, 戌 and 丑, which are exactly the seats in the table below. The orphan star holds the first day of a season and the widow star holds the last, so neither one sits outside the calendar.

The rule moves one branch each way

The instruction is one line. 進前一辰見寅為孤，退後一辰見戌為寡. One branch forward gives the orphan. One branch back gives the widow. Take the three branches that share a direction, step past the last of them, and you have 孤. Step behind the first of them, and you have 寡.

All four orphan seats, 寅, 巳, 申 and 亥, are the branches that open a season, and the four widow seats are 辰, 未, 戌 and 丑, the tombs, so one marker lands on a beginning and the other on a storage.

Where the names come from

The chapter gives two derivations and prefers the second, which 三車 states as the working rule for what a person is to an element. 以生我者為母，尅我者為夫，我尅者為妻. Whatever produces me is the mother, whatever controls me is the husband, whatever I control is the wife.

Take the north group, water. Water's mother is metal, and metal dies at 寅, so 寅 is where the mother line ends. Water's wife is fire, and fire is stored at 戌, so 戌 is where the wife is buried. The chapter compresses the scheme into a few characters. 是取母絶為孤辰，夫墓妻墓為寡宿. The orphan is taken from the mother's extinction, the widow from the tomb of a husband or a wife. 其義尤切. This reading is the sharper one.

Which is why I do not read the pair as loneliness: 孤 marks a place where the line that fed you stops, and 寡 marks a place where a partner is kept. One is an ending upstream, the other a storage downstream, and both fall out of the twelve stages rather than out of anything you did.

The pair that sits across a corner

Then the chapter gives one example, and it is my favourite line in the volume. 如辛丑人得庚寅，寅為丑孤辰，丑為寅寡宿，寅丑互為孤寡. A person born on 辛丑 whose chart also holds 庚寅 carries both stars at once, because 寅 is 丑's orphan and 丑 is 寅's widow. Two neighbouring branches, each holding the other's loss.

The geometry behind it has a name. 丑寅中有艮卦隔，乾坤艮巽四猶之角也. The trigram 艮 sits between 丑 and 寅, and the four corner trigrams, 乾, 坤, 艮 and 巽, mark the corners of the compass the way a corner marks a room. Check the table against the eight trigrams and the other three pairs behave the same way. 辰 and 巳 straddle 巽, 未 and 申 straddle 坤, 戌 and 亥 straddle 乾. The orphan of one group and the widow of the next are always the two branches a corner trigram separates.

What it promises and what it lets go

The conditions read grim on the surface. 燭神經 says a chart carrying the pair gives 形孤骨露，面無和氣，不利六親, a figure with no flesh on it and no ease among relatives. Then the qualification. 生旺稍可，死絶尤甚. A strong chart manages it, a weak one carries it heavily. Pair the star with 驛馬 and the person drifts far from home.

Then come the escape clauses, and there are three of them. 鬼谷遺文 says 連屬不言孤寡. If the branches link into a chain, do not read orphan or widow at all. The chapter's example is 亥 arriving with both 寅 and 戌, so that the two stars appear together with the group that produced them. Add a gathering of supporting stems and branches around a noble, and a chart carries the pair without the reading.

珞琭子 supplies the weighting that decides which of the two is doing the work. 陽以孤辰為重，陰以寡宿為重. In a yang chart the orphan weighs more. In a yin chart the widow does.

The inner partner

Here the Wang commentary earns its place, because it describes a mechanism rather than a misfortune. 男命生於妻絶之中而逢孤辰，平生難於婚偶. A man born where the wife's element is extinguished, meeting the orphan star, finds marriage hard. 女命生於夫絶之位而遇寡宿，屢嫁不能偕老. A woman born where the husband's element ends, meeting the widow star, marries repeatedly and grows old with none of them.

Read the second sentence without the star. Someone who marries repeatedly and settles with nobody is not short of partners. She carries a fixed image and asks each new person to fit it. Jung put that image inside the psyche and gave it a name. The anima and animus are the unconscious feminine in a man and the unconscious masculine in a woman, and he took the first word from the Latin for soul. He ranked the work too: the meeting with the shadow is the apprentice piece, the meeting with the anima the masterpiece.

The danger he named is the one the widow star describes: a state of anima possession, he wrote, must be prevented, because the figure then runs the outer life instead of the inner one. Forced back where it belongs, the figure works as a medium between the ego and the unconscious. The last stage he described, Sophia, comes with the line I would underline for anyone holding this star: no single object can fully and permanently contain the images it is related to.

Two husbands cannot hold an image that belongs to the inner world, because the image is not looking for a person.

How I read it now

I read the pair as a coordinate with a direction attached: 孤 names the place where a supply ended, usually earlier than the person can remember, and that place wants mourning. 寡 names the place where something is stored and waiting, and that place wants an inventory.

With the woman in her fifties we did the inventory. I asked her to write down what both husbands had in common in the first year, and the list had almost nothing to do with either man. It described a figure she had been looking for since she was nineteen, and when she said the word rescuer she went quiet for a while.

Her chart still carries 寡宿. What changed is what happens when she meets someone new. She now checks whether the person is being asked to carry something, and lately the answer has been no.

An exercise for the widow star

If your chart holds 寡, write down the last three people you wanted to keep. Under each name, list the qualities you noticed in the first month, then set the three lists side by side and strike out everything specific to one person. What is left is the figure. Put two questions to it, one about what it wants from me and one about what I keep handing to other people instead. Give it a page, no more. The aim is to move the conversation inside, where the manual says the seat already is.

Nothing in this pair predicts a house with nobody in it: it marks two points on a calendar, one where a season opens and one where a season closes, and then asks which of the two you are standing at. The exercise above is one way to answer that.

This article is offered for spiritual guidance and entertainment purposes only. It is not a substitute for medical, legal, or financial advice.