Gui Wei · Yin Water Goat

Meaning

Gui Wei is the summer rain falling on the Goat’s warm earth, which drinks it in. The tradition reads gentleness and intuition, a care that works quietly and does well to set its own limits.

Gui over Wei: yin Water over yin Earth, a stem its branch controls, as Earth controls Water.

Gui, Yin Water, is the rain and the dew: gentle, everywhere, giving life quietly. The Goat, also called the Sheep or the Ram, is gentle, artistic and kind.

The zodiac reads a Gui Wei year as the Water Goat’s. The Water Goat is the most intuitive of the Goats: gentle, imaginative, attuned to the moods of others. It flows with life, and gains by setting a few clear limits.

Its Na Yin, shared with Ren Wu, is Willow wood (楊柳木 yángliǔ mù): a sound of Wood, heard beside the pillar’s Water and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1823, 1883, 1943, 2003, 2063, 2123 and 2183, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Goat month of every Yi or Geng year, opened by Minor Heat, as in the solar years 2020 and 2025.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 9 January, 10 March, 9 May, 8 July, 6 September and 5 November.
• As an hour: the Goat’s double hour, 13:00–15:00, of Yi and Geng days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Gui, sitting on Wei, the partner palace: Wei holds Ji, Ding and Yi, Gui’s Seven Killings, Indirect Wealth and Eating God, and Gui stands at its Storehouse 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-hitsuji, gyemi and Quý Mùi, with each language’s readings of 癸 and 未.

How Ulune calculates it

Gui Wei is the 20th of the sixty pillars: the 10th 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).

Gui Wei belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Xu to Gui Wei, whose stems meet the branches from Xu to Wei and leave out Shen and You: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 10th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences