Hour animal

Meaning

The hour animal is the animal of the double hour of birth: the branch of the hour pillar, seen as one of the twelve animals. The Chinese day has twelve hours of two of ours each, every one named by a branch and so by an animal: the Rat hour from 23:00 to 01:00, around midnight, the Ox hour from 01:00, and so round to the Pig hour from 21:00, with the Horse hour, from 11:00 to 13:00, around the Sun’s noon.

The tradition reads it as the secret animal: the private self, shown to few, the side a person keeps for themselves and for those who know them best. In BaZi the hour pillar stands for the children and for the later years, the fruit of a life rather than its root; Chinese astrology keeps that sense in the hour animal, the last of the four and the only one that needs an exact birth time.

It is also the most delicate of the four. A birth certificate gives a clock’s time, and a clock can be far from the Sun: all of China keeps Beijing time, so at Kashgar, in the far west, noon on the clock comes nearly three hours before the Sun’s noon, in the Dragon or the Snake hour. Without a birth time the hour animal stays unknown, and three animals are read instead of four.

In practice

• Ulune’s reading of each animal as the secret one: the Rat a quiet collector of ideas and memories; the Ox a worker who needs no applause; the Tiger burning for causes it does not always show; the Rabbit a dreamer with a well-ordered world of its own; the Dragon nursing great dreams; the Snake seeing more than it says; the Horse keeping an independent heart; the Goat an artist with a rich inner world; the Monkey a clever strategist; the Rooster keeping an exacting eye on itself; the Dog a guardian who worries for those it loves; the Pig keeping a hopeful, trusting heart.
• With the other animals: the hour animal meets the year, month and day animals in the tradition’s relations, and Ulune lists each one; between two people, the Relationship lens compares it with every animal of the other.
• On the clock: the hour is read on true solar time at the birthplace by default. Noon on the clock in Paris in June, in summer time, is about 10:10 by the Sun, the Snake hour; read on the clock on the wall, it would be the Horse hour. A birth within five minutes of an hour’s edge is marked as uncertain.
• The Rat hour: from 23:00 to 01:00, it already belongs to the next day by the tradition’s rule, so a birth at 23:30 has the next day’s day animal as well as the Rat hour.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology the sign rising on the horizon also changes about every two hours, and also needs the birth time, which is why popular Western books have often called the hour animal the ascendant. The two are read the other way round, though: the Ascendant is the face shown to the world, the hour animal the self kept from it.
• Noon is still the Horse’s: in Chinese, morning and afternoon are shangwu and xiawu, before and after the Wu hour, and in Japanese gozen and gogo, written 午前 and 午後, “before the Horse” and “after the Horse”; midnight in Chinese is ziye, the night of the Zi hour.
• In medieval Europe the monastic hours, Prime, Terce, Sext and None, also named the parts of the day: the siesta comes from sexta, the sixth hour, at midday, and the English noon from nona, the ninth, which slid back to midday.

Origin and history

Dividing the day into twelve double hours is old in China: by the Han dynasty the hours had names of their own, such as midnight, cockcrow and sunrise, and the branches came to name them as they named the months and the years. Clocks kept them: the astronomical clock tower that Su Song built at Kaifeng in the 1090s showed each double hour with wooden figures that came to its windows, as his own treatise, the Xin Yixiang Fayao, describes and Joseph Needham and his colleagues retell in Heavenly Clockwork.

The hour was the last place to be read. Han Yu’s epitaph for Li Xuzhong, in the 9th century, speaks of the year, the month and the day; the hour pillar, which makes the four pillars, is usually credited to the Song school of Xu Ziping, and the Yuanhai Ziping gives the rule of the five rats that sets each hour’s stem. The hour animal as the secret self is the reading 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

Ulune finds the double hour from the time of birth on the birthplace’s own clock: true solar time by default, or local mean time or the clock on the wall in Settings → Chinese traditions. True solar time is Greenwich time moved by four minutes for every degree of longitude, then by the equation of time, up to about a quarter of an hour either way through the year, so that 12:00 is the moment the Sun stands highest. The Rat hour runs from 23:00 to 01:00 and each next animal two hours later. The hour’s stem follows the day’s by the rule of the five rats, which Ulune counts as an unbroken run of hours, twelve a day, through the sixty-cycle. Without a birth time there is no hour animal, and a birth within five minutes of an hour’s edge is marked as uncertain.

Correspondences