Metal

Meaning

Metal is the phase of gathering in: the harvest brought home in autumn, the leaves falling, the air turning clear and cool. It is also the phase of form, the ore refined in the fire and cast into a vessel, the blade that cuts clean. “The Great Plan” says that metal yields and changes, taking the shape of its mould, and the tradition reads in it both the firmness of what is decided and the readiness to be shaped.

It is the young yin, the moment the cycle turns from growth to gathering. Earth feeds it, bearing ore in its veins; it feeds Water, as dew gathers on cold metal and springs run from the rock; it checks Wood, as the axe and the knife shape a tree; and Fire checks it, softening and melting it in the forge.

Its gifts, as the tradition gives them, are clarity, integrity, a sense of justice, high standards and the courage to decide, and its virtue in the Confucian scheme is righteousness (義 yì), doing what is right because it is right. Much of it is read as rigidity, standards that leave no room; little of it as structure and limits still to be strengthened. The tradition answers with balance: warmth and softness for a hard Metal, order and clear choices for a soft one.

In practice

• In BaZi, two stems are Metal: Geng, yang Metal, the raw ore and the axe, made sharper by the forge, and Xin, yin Metal, the jewel and the fine blade, shining when it is washed clean. Two branches are Metal, Shen and You, the Monkey and the Rooster, the months of autumn. A Metal Day Master finds its resource in Earth, its peers in Metal, its output in Water, its wealth in Wood and the power that shapes it in Fire.
• In Chinese astrology, the Monkey and the Rooster are Metal animals by their branch. The years 2030 and 2031 are Metal years, the Metal Dog’s and the Metal Pig’s; the next pair is 2040 and 2041, the Metal Monkey’s and the Metal Rooster’s.
• In Feng Shui, the west and the north-west are Metal, with the trigrams Dui, the lake, and Qian, heaven; so are the stars 6 White, the star of authority and of support from above, and 7 Red, the star of speech, charm and pleasure.
• With little Metal, the tradition suggests order, clear choices and finishing what you start; with much of it, warmth, softness and room to bend.

Across traditions

• Western astrology has no element of Metal. Its nearest echo is the alchemists’ seven metals, one to each planet: gold to the Sun, silver to the Moon, quicksilver to Mercury, copper to Venus, iron to Mars, tin to Jupiter and lead to Saturn.
• Chinese astronomy calls Venus the Metal star, 金星 jīnxīng, for its white brilliance: the morning and evening star of the West, which the Greeks named Phosphoros and Hesperos.
• The taste of Metal in “The Great Plan” is pungent, 辛 xīn, the very character of the yin Metal stem Xin: in the Chinese scheme a name, a taste and a phase can share one sign.

Origin and history

The character 金 first meant bronze, the metal of the ritual vessels of the Shang and Zhou dynasties, and appears on the Zhou bronzes themselves; only later did it come to mean gold above all. The monthly ordinances of the Lüshi Chunqiu (c. 239 BC) and the Huainanzi (139 BC) give Metal the autumn and the west, white as its colour (白 bái) and the White Tiger of the western sky as its emblem. BaZi’s classics give the Metal stems their images: in the Di Tian Sui, Geng is the strongest and most forthright of the stems, tempered by fire, and Xin is soft and pure, at its best when washed by water.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune reads Metal in the stems Geng and Xin and the branches Shen and You, in a pillar or hidden in another branch: Si holds Geng among its hidden stems, Chou and Xu hold Xin. In BaZi’s balance Metal is read as much of it from about 2.5 of the nine points, little under half a point. In Feng Shui the west and north-west palaces and the stars 6 and 7 are Metal. Ulune draws Metal in a white-grey that shows in both themes.

Correspondences