Horse

Meaning

The Horse is the seventh of the twelve animals, the animal of the branch Wu: Fire, yang, the south, noon and midsummer, the brightest point of the year. In China the horse stands for speed, freedom and success: a common wish is 馬到成功, “success as soon as the horse arrives”, and the tradition reads in the Horse the same energy that gets things moving.

Ulune’s portrait reads it as free, lively and warm: it loves movement, company and open spaces; quick to decide and quick to act, it brings energy and good humour wherever it goes. Its gifts are enthusiasm, independence, frankness and a gift for making friends. What the tradition asks it to watch is the speed that makes it what it is: impatience and haste, and leaving things halfway when the next road calls.

Its branch is the height of summer, the moment yang is greatest and yin is born again, and the Horse is read as an animal at its peak that must also learn to pace itself: a gallop, then a rest. Its phase is Fire, warmth, joy and visibility, and inside its branch lies a little Earth, the ground that summer ripens.

In practice

• As the year animal, the Horse is how others see a person and the generation they share: those born from Lichun 2026 to Lichun 2027 are Fire Horses, from Lichun 2038 Earth Horses.
• As the inner, true and secret animal: as the month animal, Ulune reads the Horse’s restlessness inside, a need for movement, freedom and open horizons; as the day animal, a partner warm and spontaneous, best with someone who travels alongside rather than holds back; as the hour animal, a longing for open space and an independent heart.
• The five Horses: the Wood Horse is the friendliest, the Fire Horse gallops at full speed, its strength a gift to aim well, the Earth Horse thinks before it runs, the Metal Horse is the most determined, the Water Horse the most adaptable. Wood came in 1954 and 2014, Fire in 1966 and 2026, Earth in 1978, Metal in 1990, Water in 2002.
• Its relations: the Horse’s allies are the Tiger and the Dog, its trine of Fire; its partner in harmony is the Goat. It clashes with the Rat, harms the Ox, forms a destruction with the Rabbit, and meets itself in a self-punishment.
• In time: 2026 is a Horse year, so every Horse is in its own year; the tradition reads it as a year of renewal that asks for care with big changes. A Rat year such as 2032 is its clash year; the Goat, Tiger and Dog years are its friendly ones.

Across traditions

• In Japan the Horse is uma; in Korea mal; in Vietnam ngựa, of the branch Ngọ. In Japan an Edo-period superstition about girls born in a Fire Horse year, hinoe-uma, was strong enough that births fell by about a quarter in 1966; it has no ground in the classical texts, and Ulune reads no year as a bad one to be born in.
• Horses of heaven: Emperor Wu of Han sent armies to Ferghana, in Central Asia, for its swift “heavenly horses”, as Sima Qian tells, and the painter Xu Beihong made galloping horses a symbol of China in the 20th century.
• Western astrology has the centaur of Sagittarius, half human and half horse, a sign of travel and freedom close to the Horse’s spirit, and opens Cancer at the summer solstice in the middle of the Horse’s month.

Origin and history

The Horse is the animal of Wu in Wang Chong’s Lunheng, in the 1st century, which says that Wu is Fire and its creature the horse. The horse had long been a measure of power in China: the Zhou counted their chariots, the Han their cavalry, and the Shiji of Sima Qian (c. 94 BC) records the campaigns fought for the horses of Ferghana. That the Horse should hold noon and midsummer, the most active point of the cycle, has seemed fitting to every commentator.

BaZi’s classics read the branch Wu, the peak of Fire, rather than the Horse itself. The Horse’s portrait as it is known now, the free and warm traveller, is that of popular books of the 20th century in Chinese, English and French, such as Theodora Lau’s Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes (1979).

How Ulune calculates it

The Horse is the branch Wu: a year, month, day or hour whose pillar’s branch is Wu is a Horse. Ulune counts the Horse year from Lichun: the Fire Horse year runs from Lichun 2026, at 20:02 UT on 3 February, to Lichun 2027, and the page gives the other answer when Chinese New Year would differ; the Horse month runs from Mangzhong, about 6 June, to Xiaoshu in early July; the Horse hour from 11:00 to 13:00 on true solar time, with true noon at its middle. On Ulune’s wheel the Horse stands at the bottom, at the south, opposite the Rat. Its portraits, with its five phases and its places, are Ulune’s own texts, written from what popular books commonly say.

Correspondences