Snake

Meaning

The Snake is the sixth of the twelve animals, the animal of the branch Si: Fire, yin, the first month of summer and the late morning, when the warmth builds before noon. The Chinese call it the little dragon, and give it something of the dragon’s depth: a quiet power, an old wisdom, the gift of renewal that its shed skins seem to promise.

Ulune’s portrait reads it as wise, discreet and intuitive: it thinks before it moves, then moves precisely; elegant and reserved, it sees through appearances and keeps its own counsel. Its gifts are insight, calm, focus and a sense of beauty. What the tradition asks it to watch is the other side of its reserve: secrecy and suspicion, and holding on too tightly to people and things.

Its branch gives the Snake its heat, held rather than shown. Si is the month when yang has fully come out, and the Snake is read as an animal of concentrated energy: the warmth of a stone in the sun, a fire that works slowly and surely. Inside its branch Metal is born, and the Snake is often read as the one who sees what will come with the autumn before others feel it.

In practice

• As the year animal, the Snake is how others see a person and the generation they share: those born from Lichun 2025 to Lichun 2026 are Wood Snakes, from Lichun 2037 Fire Snakes.
• As the inner, true and secret animal: as the month animal, Ulune reads the Snake’s depth inside, thinking long, feeling strongly and keeping one’s own counsel; as the day animal, a partner devoted and perceptive, who needs deep trust and gives it in return; as the hour animal, someone wise and watchful, who sees more than they say.
• The five Snakes: the Wood Snake is the artist, drawn to ideas that last, the Fire Snake the most magnetic, leading from behind the scenes, the Earth Snake the most even-tempered, the Metal Snake clear-minded and self-reliant, the Water Snake the deepest, a reader of hidden motives. Wood came in 1965 and 2025, Fire in 1977, Earth in 1989, Metal in 2001, Water in 2013, and Fire again in 2037.
• Its relations: the Snake’s allies are the Rooster and the Ox, its trine of Metal; its partner in harmony is the Monkey, a bond that also counts a punishment and a destruction, close and demanding at once. It clashes with the Pig, harms the Tiger, and belongs to the ungrateful punishment with the Tiger and the Monkey.
• In time: the Snake’s own years return every twelve, 2025 and 2037; a Pig year such as 2031 is its clash year; the Rooster and Ox years are its allied ones.

Across traditions

• In Japan the Snake is hebi; in Korea baem; in Vietnam rắn, of the branch Tỵ. Chinese myth gives the first couple, Fuxi and Nüwa, the bodies of serpents, and Han tomb carvings show them entwined.
• The Legend of the White Snake, told for a thousand years and fixed in print in the 17th century, makes a snake spirit the loving and loyal heroine; the Snake of China is less often the tempter of the West than a wise and faithful power.
• In India the nāgas, serpent beings, shelter the meditating Buddha from the rain, and in Greece the snake coils round the staff of Asclepius: across traditions the snake stands for knowledge and renewal, as the Chinese Snake does.

Origin and history

The Snake is the animal of Si in Wang Chong’s Lunheng, in the 1st century, which says that Si is Fire and its creature the snake; Xu Shen’s Shuowen Jiezi (c. 100) already saw a snake in the shape of the character 巳 itself. Snakes and dragons were close kin in Chinese thought, and many places still call a Snake year a year of the little dragon.

The story of Lady White, a snake spirit who becomes a woman, marries a young man of Hangzhou and is imprisoned under the Leifeng Pagoda, took its classic form in Feng Menglong’s collection of 1624 and became one of the great operas and films of China. BaZi’s classics read the branch Si rather than the Snake; the Snake’s portrait as it is known now, wise, elegant and private, 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 Snake is the branch Si: a year, month, day or hour whose pillar’s branch is Si is a Snake. Ulune counts the Snake year from Lichun and gives the other answer when Chinese New Year would differ; the Snake month runs from Lixia, about 6 May, to Mangzhong in early June; the Snake hour from 09:00 to 11:00 on true solar time. On Ulune’s wheel the Snake stands at the south-south-east, just before the Horse at the bottom. Its portraits, with its five phases and its places, are Ulune’s own texts, written from what popular books commonly say.

Correspondences