Yi Si · Yin Wood Snake

Meaning

Yi Si opens the flower in the Snake’s early summer fire, Wood giving itself to the Fire it produces. The tradition reads refinement and a wisdom that ripens with time, a gift that shows best when it is shared.

Yi over Si: yin Wood over yin Fire, a stem that produces its branch, as Wood produces Fire.

Yi, Yin Wood, is the vine and the flower: supple, finding its way round obstacles, thriving by what it leans on. The Snake is wise, discreet and intuitive.

The zodiac reads a Yi Si year as the Wood Snake’s. The Wood Snake is the artist among the Snakes: refined, thoughtful, drawn to beauty and to ideas that last. Its wisdom grows with time, and it shares it best when it lets people in.

Its Na Yin, shared with Jia Chen, is Fire of the lamp (覆燈火 fùdēng huǒ): a sound of Fire, heard beside the pillar’s Wood and Fire.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1845, 1905, 1965, 2025, 2085 and 2145, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Snake month of every Ding or Ren year, opened by Start of Summer, as in the solar years 2022 and 2027.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 31 January, 1 April, 31 May, 30 July, 28 September and 27 November.
• As an hour: the Snake’s double hour, 09:00–11:00, of Ding and Ren days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Yi, sitting on Si, the partner palace: Si holds Bing, Wu and Geng, Yi’s Hurting Officer, Direct Wealth and Direct Officer, and Yi stands at its Bath 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 kinoto-mi, eulsa and Ất Tỵ, with each language’s readings of 乙 and 巳.

How Ulune calculates it

Yi Si is the 42nd of the sixty pillars: the 2nd of the ten stems over the 6th 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).

Yi Si belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Chen to Gui Chou, whose stems meet the branches from Chen to Chou and leave out Yin and Mao: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 21st of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences