Trine

Meaning

A trine gathers three branches four places apart, a triangle on the circle of twelve, into one phase. There are four: Shen, Zi and Chen make Water, the Monkey, the Rat and the Dragon; Hai, Mao and Wei make Wood, the Pig, the Rabbit and the Goat; Yin, Wu and Xu make Fire, the Tiger, the Horse and the Dog; Si, You and Chou make Metal, the Snake, the Rooster and the Ox.

Each trine is the life of its phase. Its first branch is where the phase is born, its middle one where it peaks, its last the storehouse where it is gathered in: Water is born in Shen, peaks in Zi, midwinter, and is stored in Chen. That is why the peak, one of the four cardinal branches, is the heart of each trine, and why the three, though of different phases on their own, pull together.

The zodiac reads the three animals of a trine as allies: at ease together, pulling the same way, with a shared sense of what matters. BaZi reads a whole trine, its three branches standing in a chart, as an alliance that lends its phase real weight, strong enough, when the season agrees, to turn the three into that phase.

In practice

• Between a person’s animals: Ulune reads two animals of one trine as two sides of a life that share a direction, so that plans involving both tend to come together easily.
• Two people: in the Relationship lens, two people whose animals share a trine are allies, the tradition’s easiest company.
• The year ahead: a year of the year animal’s trine is an allied year in the tradition, when plans tend to flow and efforts carry, and a month the same way.
• In BaZi a whole trine transforms into its phase when the month supports it and no other branch clashes any of the three; two of its branches with the peak make a half trine, which leans towards the phase, and a luck pillar or a year can bring the missing branch.
• In Feng Shui the year’s trine places the Three Killings: opposite the direction of its phase, the south in a Water year, for instance.

Across traditions

• In Western astrology the trine is the same triangle, three signs 120° apart, and the same easy flow. Mapped as the Chinese astrology of the Seven Governors mapped them, Yin, Wu and Xu fall on Sagittarius, Leo and Aries, the Western fire triplicity, while the other trines carry other elements.
• The triplicities of Western astrology are also three signs of one element, read as allies; but where the Chinese trine follows a phase from birth to storehouse, the Western one gathers three signs of a single nature.
• In Indian astrology the trikonas, the first, fifth and ninth houses of a chart, make a triangle again, and are counted its most favourable places.

Origin and history

The trines are among the oldest of the relations. The Huainanzi, in 139 BC, says that Wood is born in Hai, in its prime in Mao and dies in Wei, and that the three branches are all Wood, and says the same of each phase. Xiao Ji’s Wuxing Dayi, around 600, returns to the three branches of each phase, and the Song books of the Zi Ping school, the Yuanhai Ziping first, read the trines in a chart, with the twelve life stages that grew from the same course of birth, peak and storehouse.

The almanacs and the Feng Shui schools used them for the year: the Three Killings, the year’s afflictions, are placed by the year’s trine. The trine animals as allies, and the four triangles as a guide to friendship, came to the zodiac with the popular books of the 20th century, such as Theodora Lau’s Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes (1979).

How Ulune calculates it

Two branches belong to one trine when their places, Zi counting 0, differ by four or eight; the trine’s phase is fixed by its peak, Zi Water, Mao Wood, Wu Fire, You Metal. The zodiac names a trine between any two animals of it. BaZi names a whole trine only when all three branches stand in the chart, and checks the season and the absence of a clash before reading it as its phase; two branches with the peak make a half trine, which never transforms on its own.

Correspondences