Xin Wei · Yin Metal Goat

Meaning

Xin Wei lays the jewel in the Goat’s late-summer earth, which produces and shelters it. The tradition reads refinement in a protective setting: high standards and sensitivity that grow best among people who value them.

Xin over Wei: yin Metal over yin Earth, a stem its branch produces, as Earth produces Metal.

Xin, Yin Metal, is the jewel and the fine blade: refined, precise, shining when it is washed clean. The Goat, also called the Sheep or the Ram, is gentle, artistic and kind.

The zodiac reads a Xin Wei year as the Metal Goat’s. The Metal Goat hides a firm core under its softness: refined, sensitive, protective of what it loves. Its standards are high, and it learns to let things be imperfect.

Its Na Yin, shared with Geng Wu, is Earth by the roadside (路旁土 lùpáng tǔ): a sound of Earth, heard beside the pillar’s Metal and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1811, 1871, 1931, 1991, 2051, 2111 and 2171, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Goat month of every Jia or Ji year, opened by Minor Heat, as in the solar years 2024 and 2029.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 26 February, 27 April, 26 June, 25 August, 24 October and 23 December.
• As an hour: the Goat’s double hour, 13:00–15:00, of Jia and Ji days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Xin, sitting on Wei, the partner palace: Wei holds Ji, Ding and Yi, Xin’s Indirect Resource, Seven Killings and Indirect Wealth, and Xin stands at its Decline 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 kanoto-hitsuji, sinmi and Tân Mùi, with each language’s readings of 辛 and 未.

How Ulune calculates it

Xin Wei is the 8th of the sixty pillars: the 8th of the ten stems over the 8th 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).

Xin Wei belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Zi to Gui You, whose stems meet the branches from Zi to You and leave out Xu and Hai: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 4th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences