Nine Heaven

The most upward-facing of the eight deities: the sky overhead, and the father of a household. The temperament that goes with it is hard-edged and restless, with no patience for sitting still. What it actually measures is altitude and speed — how high a thing can be taken, and how fast it gets there. And it carries the nerve to do all of that out in the open, where everyone can watch.

• High and far — large ambition and a long line of sight, and also literal distance: long journeys and flight.
• Speed — fast progress, fast expansion; a moment for making the first move rather than waiting to see.
• Going public — promoting yourself, widening the circle you are known in, going after reputation and after gain.
• A temperament that is competitive, proud and full of energy — and liable to aim higher than the ground underneath will support.

Nine Heaven and Nine Earth (九地) are a matched pair, and the pair is easiest to hold as one high and one low. Nine Heaven is the upper floor, the bright open ground in front of a building, the skylight and the roof; Nine Earth is the low room, the enclosed one, the basement. When one of the two shows up in a reading it is usually worth asking what the other one is doing.

Nature

The eyes go up and out. Nothing holds the attention of the person involved quite like the question of whether there is another level above this one. Being boxed in or held down is intolerable, and what they carry around is the bigger picture somewhere further off — high-spirited to look at, and privately afraid of being pulled back to where they started.

Style

Fast, and forever trying to move a thing up a level: handed the same task as everyone else, the person involved is asking whether it could be done on a larger stage instead. Patience for the fiddly parts runs out quickly, the first sight of an opening is enough to make them take off, and a following wind is treated as a reason to accelerate again.

Strength

Pushing the ceiling upward. The same undertaking changes order of magnitude in the hands of the person involved, and reach spreads a long way in a short time. Strategy, expansion and outward-facing development are the roles that fit, and the higher the seat, the more room there is to work in.

Impression

There is lift in the way the person involved comes into a room: confident, willing to charge at things, ideals and ambition left out in plain view rather than covered over. Other people file them under "the ones on the way up". What shows at first meeting is the momentum; how deep the ambition runs takes considerably longer to see.

Pitfall

Flying fast is no guarantee that anything underneath is ready to catch the person involved. Foundations and practical limits get skipped, detail and risk get no patience, and the vision keeps running ahead of what has actually been built. If the climb stalls, the drop is exactly as far as the climb was.

In a home, Nine Heaven is the high, the bright and the wide open — the bright hall being the open, well-lit ground directly in front of the building.

• Indoors: balconies, windows, skylights, an office on a high floor, a broadcast room, and the wall where a landscape painting hangs.
• Outdoors: airports, broadcast towers, television stations, tall buildings, radar stations and viewing platforms, along with the open forecourt of a building.
• Objects: aircraft and anything else that flies, gold, silver and jewellery, mirrors and metal vessels.
• At the level of the whole property: a high-floor condominium carries the quality of Nine Heaven in itself.

The same room carries a gate, a star and a deity all at once. Three layers, three separate symbols, sitting side by side without cancelling each other out.