Serpent

Of the eight deities, Serpent is the one that governs change — mild in manner, and venomous the moment it opens its mouth. Its department is the uncanny: fright, strangeness, matters that will not settle. When something keeps doubling back on itself and refuses to go the way it was supposed to, Serpent is usually somewhere in the picture.

• Repetition and entanglement — a decision reversed and reversed again, a matter that circles instead of closing.
• Falsehood and suspicion — claims that do not hold up, mistrust running both ways, a situation that is not what it looks like.
• Fright and strangeness — bad dreams, an unsettled mind, and anomalies nobody can account for.
• As a person: the cunning and changeable type, and equally the strikingly showy one who catches every eye.

⚠ Two spellings exist in Chinese — 螣蛇 and 腾蛇 — and they are one deity, not two symbols. The other thing worth holding separate is the feng shui reading, which drops a layer down to shape rather than character: walking into a room looking for "deceit" finds nothing, because what is there is the coiled thing.

Nature

The antenna is turned up further than most. A pause in a tone of voice, the hesitation sitting behind an expression — the person involved has picked it up before anyone else noticed there was anything to pick up. Thinking does not travel in straight lines here, and half of any given day is spent in the room while the other half is spent inside a picture that has formed in the mind.

Style

Output rides entirely on state. When the inspiration arrives, one night covers what would take somebody else a week; when it goes, nothing can be pushed through at all. Being boxed in by process is intolerable, so the habit is to run several routes through the imagination first and then keep adjusting along the way.

Strength

A natural reader of symbols, metaphor and imagery — and of the layer of a conversation that never gets said aloud. The person involved can take a concept that loops back on itself and hand it back as a phrase that lands as a picture on first hearing. Creative work, planning and research all suit that.

Impression

The impression left is hard to see through: clever, with depth, and slightly untethered. Usually quiet, and when the person involved does speak it tends to go straight to the point. There is a layer in the way at first meeting, and the real shape only shows once people have been around a while.

Pitfall

The trouble is overthinking. One thought gets spun into ten readings until none of them is believable any more, including the first one. Ideas pile up and none of them lands; feeling and speculation twist into a knot that turns without moving, and in the end an imagined fear is doing the steering.

In feng shui, Serpent is read for its shape rather than its temperament: what to look for on site is anything coiled, twisting or winding.

• Objects: rope, cabling, belts, hoses and springs — anything that curls.
• Indoors: darkrooms, rooms carrying too many mirrors, shadowed corners, and spaces thick with smoke.
• Outdoors: fog-bound ground, maze-like paths, abandoned factories, and gloomy woodland.

⚠ Every deity reads on two layers: the human layer (character, and how a situation behaves) and the object layer (what it looks like inside a building). On site the object layer is the one in use — Serpent means shifting falsehood in a reading, but in the house it is that coiled length of rope.