Wu Wu · Yang Earth Horse

Meaning

Wu Wu sets the mountain over the Horse’s midsummer fire, which feeds it to its peak, the branch of its Sword Edge. The tradition reads a practical, generous strength that keeps its word and its freedom alike.

Wu over Wu: yang Earth over yang Fire, a stem its branch produces, as Fire produces Earth.

Wu, Yang Earth, is the mountain: solid, broad, unmoved by passing weather. The Horse is free, lively and warm.

The zodiac reads a Wu Wu year as the Earth Horse’s. The Earth Horse is the Horse that thinks before it runs: practical, kind, steadier than most Horses. Its freedom matters to it, and so does keeping its promises.

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

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1858, 1918, 1978, 2038, 2098 and 2158, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Horse month of every Wu or Gui year, opened by Grain in Ear, as in the solar years 2023 and 2028.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 13 February, 14 April, 13 June, 12 August, 11 October and 10 December.
• As an hour: the Horse’s double hour, 11:00–13:00, of Wu and Gui days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Wu, sitting on Wu, the partner palace: Wu holds Ding and Ji, Wu’s Direct Resource and Rob Wealth, and Wu stands at its Peak 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 tsuchinoe-uma, mu-o and Mậu Ngọ, with each language’s readings of 戊 and 午.

How Ulune calculates it

Wu Wu is the 55th of the sixty pillars: the 5th of the ten stems over the 7th 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).

Wu Wu 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