六曜 ROKUYO – A warning
"It's bad luck to be superstitious." (Andrew Mathis)
We don't want to be seen as promoters of the idea of Rokuyo - we reject the notion that it has any mystical power at all.
Here we explain why.
六曜 ROKUYO – A warning
The concept of Rokuyo suffers the same basic problem as Astrology. Many people believe that the alignment of distant planets on their birth date can affect their lives. Maybe it can, but compared with what's happening on this planet, while we are living our lives now, must surely have infinitely more impact on our lives than astrology. And yet people change their actions according to some ancient sage's interpretation of distant planets. Very strange behaviour.
Before we delve into Astrology too deeply, we can see some fundamental flaws:
- Orientation: Astronomers of old had a geocentric belief that the Earth was at the centre of the Universe, and the heavens rotated around the inside surface of a gigantic spherical ball. There is little similarity between this imagination and the observations of today's scientific astronomers. Astrologers, however, retain this geocentric concept.
- Calibration: Today's zodiac was formulated some 2,500 years ago and the solstice points have moved over 30 degrees to the west since then. So if you had been born a couple of thousand years ago, your star sign would have been different from what it is today. (Just because something has been around for a long time, doesn't mean that it's true. For many thousands of years, uneducated people believed the Earth was flat.)
- Celebration: When is our birth date? That is, when do we become beings? Or souls? Why should the zodiac be based on the time we take our first breath of fresh air? Are we not a being before that? At conception perhaps? Twins share the same 'birth sign', yet often have different personalities and talents.
- Rationalisation: Why should the position of distant planets on our birth day, have any effect at all on our lives? Why not the altitude, weather, air pressure, the local level of xenon gas in the air, magnetic field, or any other of the countless components of our very first environment? Why should we accept that the local environment has no significance, yet the position of stars billions of miles away dictate our future? The only force distant stars and planets have is their own gravity. This has negligible effect on Earth.
The answer is that these planets were once considered gods, and it was their brilliance and mystery that gave people Astrology thousands of years ago. We have now lost touch with these gods, but some people still hang on to the ideas.
Similar arguments apply to Rokuyo.
Somebody emailed us recently, asking which Rokuyo day it was on their wedding date, twelve years ago. They're now divorcing and wondered if their marriage failed because their wedding was on the 'wrong' day. It's useful to be able to put the blame on somebody or something else when things go wrong. Similarly when things go right, it's tempting to say "That proves Rokuyo / Astrology / tea-leaf-reading works!"
But let's see how this stands up. Here are a few world famous events over the past few years:
- Terrorist attack in New York on 11th September 2001. Rokuyo day was sakimake. This means bad luck in the morning, good luck in the afternoon. Well, the attack took place in the morning so this seems to support Rokuyo. And how's this for luck - World Trade Center Building No. 7 caught fire in the afternoon. It collapsed, but there was time to evacuate everyone so nobody lost their life. So that seems to support Rokuyo's 'good luck' prediction for the afternoon.
- Tsunami disaster in Asia on 26th December 2004. Rokuyo day was sakigachi. This means good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon. Oh dear... The earthquake that created the tsunami occurred at 7:59 in the morning. This doesn't fit in well with Rokuyo. Let's look at another example:
- Hurricane Katrina smashed into the American state of Louisiana on 29th August 2005. Rokuyo day was again, sakigachi: good luck in the morning, bad luck in the afternoon. Well, the hurricane made landfall in the morning, so there's another misfit for Rokuyo.
Of course, nobody is suggesting that a terrorist attack, a tsunami or a hurricane is just 'bad luck'. Quite the opposite - for the shareholders of military equipment companies, such an event is extremely 'good luck'. (Not to mention the hundreds of scam websites that always spring up within days of any disaster, to siphon donations to relief efforts.) And this brings us to the point we are trying to make:
Good fortune for one person invariably means a penalty for somebody else. Of course, everybody wants to have good luck and fortune - it's in our sorry greedy nature.
Remember Salim Sdiri of France? No? Well, I'm sure Tero Pitkämäki of Finland will.
July 13th 2007 (Friday 13th, generally bad luck but also Tomobiki - Good luck all day, except at noon) saw them at a GIAAF Golden League meet in Rome's Olimpico Stadium. Tero's sport is the javelin; Sdiri's sport is the long jump.
Tero threw his spear 80 metres, and Sdiri caught it. In his back, straight into a kidney! Talk about unlucky Friday 13th! Of course, if it struck him a few centimetres higher it would have killed him, so he was lucky there. And being out of the competition meant the other long jumpers had a better chance of winning. So lucky for them too.
Please enjoy the Rokuyo pages, but put no faith in the system. Don't even be tempted to dabble in it. Rokuyo, invented by some unknown philosophers hundreds of years ago, is no match for the power you can generate within yourself to change your life. Be assured that you will get much more benefit in life by putting faith in yourself, your family, your friends, and of course, your God.
(This page was updated on 6th June 2006. That's 6/6/6, supposedly the mark of the Devil. And yet nothing unusually bad happened on that day...)
"Experience and wisdom are the two best fortune tellers." (Anon)
Other 'lucky' pages:
