The Monkey

Recent years: 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004 and 2016, with the next Monkey year beginning in 2028. One caveat before you claim the Monkey. The Chinese year starts at Chinese New Year, never on 1 January, and New Year falls somewhere between 21 January and 20 February. 1992 did not become a Monkey year until 4 February, so a baby born on 1 February 1992 is a Goat. If you were born in January or the first weeks of February, check the New Year date for your year before you read on. The Chinese Calendar and the New Year page explains why it moves.

The Monkey's own element is Metal and its polarity is yang, the outward and active side of the pair. Ninth of the twelve animals, it belongs to the group I call the doers.

The nature of the Monkey

The Monkey is intelligence with a sense of humour. It learns fast, adapts faster, and finds something funny in situations the rest of us find merely irritating. Give a Monkey a locked door and it will not look for the key. It will look for the window.

Monkeys are curious about everything and bored by most of it within a week. They collect skills the way other people collect stamps, and they can hold a working knowledge of six subjects while a specialist is still reading the introduction to one. The charm is real. People lean towards a Monkey in a room without quite knowing why.

Underneath the performance is a mind that never fully closes. The Monkey is always noticing the pattern, the angle, the way the system actually works as opposed to the way the manual says it does.

Strengths

Inventiveness first. When a situation is stuck, the Monkey is the one who finds the sideways move nobody else thought to try. Add adaptability, so a change of plan is an opportunity, and resilience, so a setback is forgotten by Thursday.

Then the social gifts. Wit, warmth, the knack of making a tense table laugh at the right moment. In my experience the best Monkeys are the ones who use that lightness in service of something. The joke that lets a grieving family breathe for a moment is a Monkey joke.

Challenges

Focus is the big one. The Monkey mind wants new input the way a fire wants wood, and sustained effort on one thing feels like punishment. Projects get started brilliantly and abandoned at the three quarter mark.

The second shadow is cleverness without a conscience. The same mind that finds the workaround can find the way to talk someone into something they never agreed to. It is rarely malicious. It is a game that forgot the other player was real. The sharp tongue belongs here too, the tease that lands harder than it was meant to.

Framed kindly, these are the price of the gift. The work for a Monkey is to point the cleverness at the right target and then, hardest of all, to stay.

In love and friendship

A Monkey loves through laughter. If a Monkey keeps making you laugh, you are loved, whatever is or is not being said about feelings. The Monkey needs a partner who can keep up, who enjoys the banter and does not need the mood to be serious to feel that it is real.

What wears a Monkey down is heaviness: a partner who needs constant reassurance, or who treats every light remark as avoidance. What wears a partner down is the Monkey keeping everything on the surface. Depth frightens Monkeys a little, because depth cannot be joked away. The Monkey who learns to sit still in a hard conversation becomes a very good partner indeed. Boredom is the danger sign. A bored Monkey wanders.

At work

Variety, autonomy and an audience. Monkeys do well in business, sales, marketing, teaching, research, entertainment, anything that rewards fast thinking and a fresh approach. They are natural founders and poor maintainers. Put a Monkey in a routine, closely supervised role and watch the mischief start within a month.

They work best when the problem is interesting, the colleagues are quick and the results are noticed. The long patient climb to expertise is the challenge, and the Monkeys who make it are formidable.

The five Monkeys

Each animal meets each of the five elements once in sixty years, and the year element colours the animal's own Metal. Work it from the last digit of the year, as The Five Elements page explains.

The Wood Monkey, 1944 and 2004, is the steadiest of the five, more willing to build something and see it grow. The Fire Monkey, 1956 and 2016, is the showman, all energy and charisma, with the shortest fuse. The Earth Monkey, 1968 and 2028, is grounded and reliable by Monkey standards, the one who actually finishes. The Metal Monkey, 1980, is Metal on Metal, sharp, ambitious and very hard to argue with. The Water Monkey, 1932 and 1992, is the most perceptive and the most sensitive, reading people as easily as it reads problems.

Friends and rivals

The Monkey's two friends are the Rat and the Dragon, four years either side of it. Together they make the group of doers: quick, ambitious, happiest when something is happening. The Monkey's one clash is the Tiger, six years away, and a clash is friction, never a curse. The Tiger charges straight at the thing the Monkey would rather outwit, and each thinks the other is doing it wrong. The old texts also pair the Monkey with the Snake as secret friends. The friends and rivals of the Chinese zodiac post works through all the groupings.

The Monkey as a month and a day animal

The Monkey month runs from about 7 August to about 7 September, and the boundary can move by a day with the year. As a month animal the Monkey describes your private self. Whatever your year animal shows the world, inside you are solving puzzles, inventing shortcuts and keeping up a quiet running commentary on the absurdities of the day. There is almost always a side project. The Month of the Monkey post reads the live sky for that month each year, and The Twelve Months page is the reference.

The Monkey day cannot be read off a calendar. The day animal runs on a sixty day cycle of its own, so it needs a table or a calculator, and my readings compute it. As a day animal the Monkey is your truest self: the inventor underneath every role, playful even in serious work, loyal to the people who can keep up. The Day Animals page has more.

Across the traditions

The month of the Monkey overlaps most with the second half of Leo season and the first half of Virgo season, sitting almost evenly across the boundary between them, so a Monkey month birth can carry either Sun sign. The Western Astrology section and The Signs page cover that sky, and the Vedic Astrology section will add the sidereal view when it opens. Different sky, different question, and I read them side by side.

When did you last stay with something long after it stopped being fun, and what did it give you?

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.