Learning Chinese Astrology

That is enough to begin. This page takes what you already have and shows you where it goes.

Start with your year

Your year animal is the one everybody knows, and it is the right place to start because you can find it in a minute. Take your birth year and count. 1900 was a Rat year, and the animals repeat every twelve years in the order Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig. So 1996, 2008 and 2020 were Rat years, 1997, 2009 and 2021 were Ox years, and so on round the circle.

Before you settle on your animal, check your birthday against Chinese New Year. The Chinese year starts between 21 January and 20 February, so a January or early February birth usually belongs to the animal before. Someone born on 20 January 1987 is a Fire Tiger, because the Fire Rabbit year did not begin until 29 January. The Chinese Calendar and the New Year page covers this properly, with the dates.

Then your element

Every year also carries one of five elements, and the last digit of the year tells you which. Years ending in 0 or 1 are Metal, 2 or 3 Water, 4 or 5 Wood, 6 or 7 Fire, 8 or 9 Earth. Put the element in front of the animal and you have your year's full name. 2026 is a Fire Horse year. 2025 was a Wood Snake year. 1990 was a Metal Horse year, and anyone born then is a Horse with a very different temper from this year's.

The element is where the twelve animals turn into sixty. Each animal meets each element once in sixty years, which is why your grandmother's Horse year and yours are not the same year. The Five Elements page explains what each one brings.

Then your month and your day

This is the part most people never reach, and it is the part I find most useful.

Your birth month has an animal too, and so does your birth day. Each one comes with its own element. In the Four Pillars tradition, which is the one I read in, the year, the month and the day are three pillars, and a fourth comes from the hour of birth. I work with three.

The Year Pillar is how the world sees you. The Month Pillar is your private self, the way you run when nobody is watching. The Day Pillar is your truest self, the character left when the masks come off. A Dragon year with a Rabbit month and an Ox day is a very different person from a Dragon year with a Tiger month and a Monkey day, and the two of them would recognise each other only at parties.

The month animal follows the sun, so its dates are nearly the same every year, and The Twelve Months page lists them. The day animal runs on a sixty day cycle that ignores the calendar completely, so it cannot be read off a date by eye. It needs a table or a calculator, and my readings work it out for you. The Day Animals page tells you what each one means once you have it.

A calendar first

I want to say this plainly because it changes how you read everything else. Chinese astrology is a calendar before it is a horoscope. The animals, the elements, yin and yang and the sixty year cycle were a way of naming time long before anyone used them to describe people. The year of the Fire Horse is first of all a year, with a beginning and an end and a mood, and everybody on Earth lives in it together.

So the year is weather. The animal you were born under is your character, the way you were shaped by the weather you arrived in. When I read a Chinese chart I am asking what kind of year you came from, what kind of month, what kind of day, and how the three of them get on.

What it is not

Chinese astrology is not a fortune, and I will not use it as one. It will not tell you which year you will marry or whether the Snake year is bad luck for a Pig. The old almanacs did say those things, and people still sell them, and I leave them on the shelf.

What it does well is describe. It describes the mood of a year so that you can work with it rather than against it. It describes the gap between how you come across and who you are inside, which is a gap most of us feel and few of us can name. It describes why two people pull together or rub each other raw. None of that is a sentence. All of it is useful.

Beside Western astrology

People ask me which one is right, the Western chart or the Chinese one, and my answer is that they are looking at different skies and asking different questions.

Western astrology watches the planets move through the zodiac against the sky of your birth, down to the minute. Chinese astrology watches the calendar: which year, which month, which day. The Western chart is a photograph of a moment. The Chinese chart is more like knowing the season, the weather and the time of day you arrived in. I read both, and they argue with each other less than you would expect. When they agree, I pay attention. When they disagree, that is usually where the interesting part of a person lives. The Western Astrology section is next door if you want the other sky.

How this section is laid out

The pages run in the order I would teach them. The Chinese Calendar and the New Year comes next, because the calendar is the foundation. The Five Elements and Yin and Yang are the two layers on every animal. Your Year, Month and Day Pillars puts the three pillars together. The Twelve Months and The Day Animals go through the month and day animals one at a time. The Animals gives each of the twelve its own page.

Read in that order if you are new to this. If you are impatient, go straight to your animal's page and come back for the rest. Most people do, and it works.

What did you already know about your animal before you read a word of this?

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