Serpent Reappears

The Serpent Seen Twice is the inauspicious formation produced when heaven-plate Gui sits over earth-plate Ren. Ren and Gui are both water, and both carry the serpent image: Ren is yang water, the long serpent; Gui is yin water, the small one. Serpent upon serpent — hence the name. Teng She, the Serpent, governs deceit, entanglement, and the uncanny; seen twice, its nature doubles, so the formation portends affairs that twist back on themselves, truth and falsehood hard to tell apart, and old matters returning. Marriage divination fears this formation most: the ancient verse speaks of remarriage upon marriage, a later union without issue, and the best years lost — hidden marital histories, tangled claims of status, the troubles of bigamy and remarriage. The formation rests on two waters running mingled, yin and yang undivided: Ren and Gui merge with no boundary between them, which in human affairs appears as overlapping relationships, promises retracted and remade, and secrets layered on secrets; the Serpent also governs phantom frights and troubled dreams, so groundless alarms often attend it. In severity this is an inauspicious formation: with door and star both inauspicious, the entanglement hardens into calamity — beware chains of deception; with door and star auspicious, it stops at exhausting back-and-forth, and the threads can finally be untangled. Points to note: in marriage divination, verify the other party's marital and family history without fail, and let the remarried settle the legal formalities of the previous union first; in general matters, guard against duplicate contracts, duplicate charges, and other chained schemes; with Teng She among the Eight Deities arriving, signs of deceit prove most reliable; in Emptiness (Kong Wang), the recurrences mostly dissolve into false alarms. For whoever meets this formation, the surest remedy is ink on paper — document everything, leave a trail for everything.