Month animal

Meaning

The month animal is the animal of the solar month of birth: the branch of the month pillar, seen as one of the twelve animals. Two people born in the same year but in different seasons share a year animal and differ here: a Horse born in the Tiger month of early spring and a Horse born in the Rooster month of autumn are not the same Horse.

The tradition reads it as the inner animal: a person’s temperament, the feelings and needs beneath the face shown to the world, the self they grow into over the years. It is also, as the month pillar is in BaZi, the place of the parents and of the family one grows up in, the setting in which that temperament formed. Where the year animal says how others see a person, the month animal says what moves them.

Its weight comes from the season. The month is the strongest of the four places in BaZi: the month’s branch decides which phase is in season and so how strong every other one is, and the classics call it the commander of the chart. The month animal carries that sense of a ground climate, the weather inside a person.

In practice

• Ulune’s reading of each animal as the inner one: the Rat’s alert mind, always planning; the Ox’s patience; the Tiger’s courage and refusal to be caged; the Rabbit’s need for peace and beauty; the Dragon’s great hopes; the Snake’s depth; the Horse’s need for open horizons; the Goat’s tenderness; the Monkey’s quick wit; the Rooster’s sense of order; the Dog’s sense of justice; the Pig’s good heart.
• With the other animals: the month animal meets the year, day and hour animals in harmonies, trines, clashes and the rest, and Ulune lists every such relation between a person’s own animals as two sides of one life that help or rub against each other.
• In time: each solar month has its animal for everyone, and the Cycles lens reads how each month of the year ahead meets the reader’s year animal; the month animal of a birth is the one that was in season that day.
• Near a change: a birth within five minutes of the solar term that opens a month is marked as uncertain, since a slightly different birth time could give the month before or after.

Across traditions

• Western astrology looks for the inner life in the Moon’s sign, the feelings and needs beneath the Sun sign; the Chinese zodiac looks for it in the month animal. The two are read differently and are never the same thing, but they answer the same question.
• The season of birth is read in many traditions: the Western Sun sign is a twelfth of the year, as the Chinese month is, though the two divisions are offset by half a sign; the Chinese month of the Tiger runs from the middle of Aquarius to the middle of Pisces.
• In BaZi the month pillar is the key to a chart’s structure, and Ulune’s structure is read from the month branch’s hidden stems, as the Ziping Zhenquan teaches.

Origin and history

The twelve months were named by the branches long before the animals: in the Huainanzi (139 BC) the handle of the Northern Dipper points at dusk to the branch of each month in turn, Yin in the first month, Mao in the second, and so round the year, which is why a month is said to be “established” in its branch. BaZi’s classics, from the Yuanhai Ziping of the Song dynasty to the San Ming Tong Hui of the Ming, count the months from the solar terms that open them, not from the new moons of the lunar calendar, and Shen Xiaozhan’s Ziping Zhenquan in the 18th century made the month the starting point of every reading.

Calling the month animal the inner animal, and reading it beside the year animal, is the work of modern popular books in Chinese, English and French in the second half of the 20th century, of which Theodora Lau’s Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes (1979) is among the best known.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune finds the solar month of a birth between the two terms that open months around it, the solar month: the Tiger month from Lichun, the Sun at 315°, the Rabbit month from Jingzhe at 345°, and so on every 30° of the Sun, the Ox month from Xiaohan at 285° closing the year. The month’s stem follows from the year’s by the rule of the five tigers, which Ulune counts as an unbroken run of months through the sixty-cycle. Like the year, the month changes at an instant, so no clock or time zone moves it; only a birth within five minutes of a term is marked uncertain.

Correspondences