Ding Wei · Yin Fire Goat

Meaning

Ding Wei keeps a lamp over the Goat’s warm earth, which holds a root of Fire and some Wood beside it. The tradition reads warmth turned into art and care, feelings strong enough to make something of.

Ding over Wei: yin Fire over yin Earth, a stem that produces its branch, as Fire produces Earth.

Ding, Yin Fire, is the candle and the lamp: a focused light that shows the way in the dark. The Goat, also called the Sheep or the Ram, is gentle, artistic and kind.

The zodiac reads a Ding Wei year as the Fire Goat’s. The Fire Goat is the bravest of the Goats: creative, expressive, warmer and bolder than most. Its feelings run strong, and it puts them to good use in art and in care.

Its Na Yin, shared with Bing Wu, is Water of the Milky Way (天河水 tiānhé shuǐ): a sound of Water, heard beside the pillar’s Fire and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1847, 1907, 1967, 2027, 2087 and 2147, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Goat month of every Ding or Ren year, opened by Minor Heat, as in the solar years 2022 and 2027.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 2 February, 3 April, 2 June, 1 August, 30 September and 29 November.
• As an hour: the Goat’s double hour, 13:00–15:00, of Ding and Ren days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ding, sitting on Wei, the partner palace: Wei holds Ji, Ding and Yi, Ding’s Eating God, Companion and Indirect Resource, and Ding stands at its Crown stage there.
• As a luck pillar or a year, it brings each Day Master the god of its stem and the god of its branch’s main qi: the Correspondences below give them for all ten.

Across traditions

• In Japan, Korea and Vietnam the same pillar is hinoto-hitsuji, jeongmi and Đinh Mùi, with each language’s readings of 丁 and 未.

How Ulune calculates it

Ding Wei is the 44th of the sixty pillars: the 4th of the ten stems over the 8th of the twelve branches, which the cycle moves on one step together, so that a stem only ever meets the branches of its polarity. Ulune counts a year’s pillar from Lichun, 1984 being Jia Zi; a month’s twelve a year through the cycle, from Bing Yin in the Tiger month of 1984 (the rule of the five tigers); a day’s by the count of days, 1 January 2000 being Wu Wu; an hour’s twelve a day (the rule of the five rats).

Ding Wei belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Chen to Gui Chou, whose stems meet the branches from Chen to Chou and leave out Yin and Mao: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 22nd of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences