Ji Wei · Yin Earth Goat

Meaning

Ji Wei lays the field on the Goat’s late-summer earth, a stem on its own phase, with Fire and Wood kept within. The tradition reads sincerity and care, strength drawn from routine and trust.

Ji over Wei: yin Earth over yin Earth, a stem standing on its own phase.

Ji, Yin Earth, is the field and the garden soil: fertile, receptive, nourishing what is planted in it. The Goat, also called the Sheep or the Ram, is gentle, artistic and kind.

The zodiac reads a Ji Wei year as the Earth Goat’s. The Earth Goat is the steadiest of the Goats: sincere, careful, attached to home and to its people. It finds its strength in routine and trust, and does well to share its worries early.

Its Na Yin, shared with Wu Wu, is Fire in the sky (天上火 tiānshàng huǒ): a sound of Fire, heard beside the pillar’s Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1859, 1919, 1979, 2039, 2099 and 2159, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Goat month of every Wu or Gui year, opened by Minor Heat, as in the solar years 2023 and 2028.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 14 February, 15 April, 14 June, 13 August, 12 October and 11 December.
• As an hour: the Goat’s double hour, 13:00–15:00, of Wu and Gui days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Ji, sitting on Wei, the partner palace: Wei holds Ji, Ding and Yi, Ji’s Companion, Indirect Resource and Seven Killings, and Ji 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 tsuchinoto-hitsuji, gimi and Kỷ Mùi, with each language’s readings of 己 and 未.

How Ulune calculates it

Ji Wei is the 56th of the sixty pillars: the 6th 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).

Ji Wei belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Yin to Gui Hai, whose stems meet the branches from Yin to Hai and leave out Zi and Chou: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 28th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences