Gui Si · Yin Water Snake

Meaning

Gui Si sets the dew in the Snake’s early summer fire, Water over the phase it controls, and Si also holds the Metal that is Water’s source. The tradition reads insight and depth, a fine perception that does not evaporate in the heat.

Gui over Si: yin Water over yin Fire, a stem that controls its branch, as Water controls Fire.

Gui, Yin Water, is the rain and the dew: gentle, everywhere, giving life quietly. The Snake is wise, discreet and intuitive.

The zodiac reads a Gui Si year as the Water Snake’s. The Water Snake is the deepest of the Snakes: intuitive, perceptive, a reader of hidden motives and a keeper of secrets. Its insight is rare, and goes far when it chooses to share it.

Its Na Yin, shared with Ren Chen, is Long-flowing water (長流水 chángliú shuǐ): a sound of Water, heard beside the pillar’s Water and Fire.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1833, 1893, 1953, 2013, 2073, 2133 and 2193, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Snake month of every Bing or Xin year, opened by Start of Summer, as in the solar years 2021 and 2026.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 19 January, 20 March, 19 May, 18 July, 16 September and 15 November.
• As an hour: the Snake’s double hour, 09:00–11:00, of Bing and Xin days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Gui, sitting on Si, the partner palace: Si holds Bing, Wu and Geng, Gui’s Direct Wealth, Direct Officer and Direct Resource, and Gui stands at its Conception 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 mizunoto-mi, gyesa and Quý Tỵ, with each language’s readings of 癸 and 巳.

How Ulune calculates it

Gui Si is the 30th of the sixty pillars: the 10th of the ten stems over the 6th 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).

Gui Si belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Shen to Gui Si, whose stems meet the branches from Shen to Si and leave out Wu and Wei: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 15th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences