The Animals

What an animal is

An animal is a quality, and it is a kind of year. The twelve Earthly Branches turn in a fixed order, one a year, and each one colours the year it governs and the people born in it. Your year animal is how the world sees you, the face you show first. It is not the whole of you. The month and day animals go deeper, and the Your Year, Month and Day Pillars page explains how the three read together.

An animal is also never a sentence. The Horse is not condemned to wander and the Ox is not doomed to plod. Each one is a character with strengths, a shadow, and a piece of work to do.

The twelve in order

The Rat page: quick, observant and resourceful, the planner who has already run the scenarios.

The Ox page: steady, patient and true to its word, the ground other people stand on.

The Tiger page: brave, passionate and protective, the one who says what the room was thinking.

The Rabbit page: gentle, tactful and far tougher than it looks, reading the mood before anyone speaks.

The Dragon page: magnetic, visionary and large, born believing in its own possibilities and yours.

The Snake page: wise, private and perceptive, thinking in layers and rarely fooled.

The Horse page: free, warm and restless, happiest moving and hardest to fence in.

The Goat page: sensitive, kind and creative, seeing the beauty the rest of us walk past.

The Monkey page: clever, playful and quick, solving the problem while making you laugh.

The Rooster page: direct, principled and exacting, awake before everyone else and saying so.

The Dog page: loyal, fair and watchful, the friend who notices who is trustworthy and who is not.

The Pig page: generous, warm and trusting, the one whose table everyone wants to sit at.

The New Year rule

The year animal runs from Chinese New Year to the next Chinese New Year, and Chinese New Year falls somewhere between 21 January and 20 February, never on 1 January. If you were born in January or the first three weeks of February, check the New Year date for your year before you settle on your animal, because you may belong to the one before. The Chinese Calendar and the New Year page walks through it with examples.

Friends and rivals

The twelve fall into four groups of three, animals four years apart, who understand each other without much effort: the champions, the doers, the thinkers and the peacemakers. Each animal also has one clash, the animal six years across the circle, and a clash is friction rather than a curse. Every animal page names its two friends and its one rival, and the post on the friends and rivals of the Chinese zodiac works through the whole pattern properly, so I will not repeat it here.

The elements on top

Each animal has an element of its own, and each year carries an element as well, read from the last digit of the year. The two layer, so a Fire Horse is a different creature from a Water Horse, and each animal meets each element once in sixty years. Every animal page lists its five versions with their years. The Five Elements page explains the elements themselves and how they feed and check one another.

How to use these pages

Find your year animal, checking the New Year rule if you were born early in the year, and read its page. Notice what fits and what does not. Then read the page for someone you know well and see whether it describes the person you actually live with. In my experience that second reading is where people start to believe the system might have something in it.

After that, find your month animal on The Twelve Months page and your day animal through a reading, and see how the three sit together. That is where the picture starts to look like a person.

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

Related pages
The Signs

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