What is 역마 (yeokma)?
A seat that will not sit still — travel, moving, changing where you are.
In plain words
Some people settle and some people keep moving. Not restlessly, not as a fault — they simply do better when the work reaches past one room: going out to sites, dealing with people elsewhere, changing the address every few years. Saju has a seat for that too, and it is called yeokma (驛馬). The name is literally “post-station horse” — the relay horse kept at a waystation so that a message could keep going.
People usually write it 역마살 with a 살 (殺) on the end, and it is often said the way you would say a curse — as though it meant a life you cannot settle into. Bokki writes it 驛馬 without the 殺. Movement is not damage. We use it to say which shape of work runs with your grain, and nothing about it is a warning.
How Bokki computes it
Same shape of table as the other special stars, keyed on the lower letter of your birth year. Year branch 申, 子 or 辰 gives 寅. 巳, 酉 or 丑 gives 亥. 寅, 午 or 戌 gives 申. 亥, 卯 or 未 gives 巳. Then we check all four lower letters of the chart, and if that branch is anywhere among them, yeokma is present. As one example run through the code: born 15 February 1980, the year branch is 申, which puts the chart in the 申子辰 group, so the travel seat is 寅 — and 寅 sits in the month, so it is present.
The four answers are always 寅, 申, 巳 or 亥 — the opening branch of each trine, the one that starts things moving. And each one is exactly the branch that clashes head-on with your own group's opener. That is the traditional picture: the travel star is the point where your settled trine gets knocked, and a knock is what sends you down the road.
Why the year branch and not the day branch? This one we can answer with a measurement rather than a preference. If the star is taken from the day branch, then anyone whose day branch is 寅, 申, 巳 or 亥 gets a travel star that is precisely the clash of their own day branch. Our day-picking screen skips clashing days entirely — so for those people the travel reason would never once appear on screen, and nobody would notice the silence. Reading from the year branch avoids that hole and keeps one basis across every screen. It is written in the source next to the table.
There is one place where we look at the star outside your birth chart: when you ask Bokki to pick good days for a trip, we check whether the day's own lower letter lands on your travel seat. That is a day being compared to your chart, not a prediction that you will travel.
What we do not compute
We do not tell you to emigrate, to change jobs, or to move house, and we do not put a date on any of those. Having the seat says something about which shape of work fits your grain — reaching out rather than staying put. It says nothing about where you will be in five years, and Bokki will not pretend otherwise.
As with the other stars, we report presence and not amount, we read the year branch only, and we drop the hour pillar out of the check when you have not told us your birth time. Lineages that read the star from the day branch exist and are not wrong; we simply hold one basis so the answer never changes between screens.
And we do not stack the special stars into a score. Yeokma sitting next to another star does not add up to anything in Bokki. Each one, when it is really there, adds one grain to how a reading is worded — that is the whole of its job here.
Closing note — the opener that is also the clash
In short: yeokma is the same four-line lookup as the other special stars, but it lands on the opening branch of each trine (寅 · 申 · 巳 · 亥) rather than its storehouse — and that opening branch is also the exact 沖 (clash) partner of its own group's start. The worked chart above (1980-02-15, Seoul) shows it end to end: year branch 申 sorts into the 申子辰 trine, whose travel seat is 寅, and 寅 is sitting right there in the month pillar, so the seat lights up from a single match against only three other branches checked.
The measured reason for reading the year branch instead of the day branch is already above, so here is the one place the star reaches outside the birth chart: the trip day-picker compares that day's own branch to your seat — a day matched against your chart, never a date it predicts you will travel on. And exactly like hwagae, a second or third matching branch never turns into a bigger number — yeokma is on or off, and nothing in Bokki counts how many times it repeats.