Yi Wei · Yin Wood Goat

Meaning

Yi Wei lays the vine on the Goat’s late-summer earth, the storehouse of Wood, which keeps a root for it. The tradition reads a kindness that is well rooted, care given easily and the strength to ask for care in return.

Yi over Wei: yin Wood over yin Earth, a stem that controls its branch, as Wood controls Earth.

Yi, Yin Wood, is the vine and the flower: supple, finding its way round obstacles, thriving by what it leans on. The Goat, also called the Sheep or the Ram, is gentle, artistic and kind.

The zodiac reads a Yi Wei year as the Wood Goat’s. The Wood Goat is kind and giving: generous with time and care, at ease in a group, attentive to those around it. It gains by asking for what it needs as easily as it gives.

Its Na Yin, shared with Jia Wu, is Metal in the sand (沙中金 shāzhōng jīn): a sound of Metal, heard beside the pillar’s Wood and Earth.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1835, 1895, 1955, 2015, 2075, 2135 and 2195, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Goat month of every Bing or Xin year, opened by Minor Heat, as in the solar years 2021 and 2026.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 21 January, 22 March, 21 May, 20 July, 18 September and 17 November.
• As an hour: the Goat’s double hour, 13:00–15:00, of Bing and Xin days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Yi, sitting on Wei, the partner palace: Wei holds Ji, Ding and Yi, Yi’s Indirect Wealth, Eating God and Companion, and Yi stands at its Nurture 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-hitsuji, eulmi and Ất Mùi, with each language’s readings of 乙 and 未.

How Ulune calculates it

Yi Wei is the 32nd of the sixty pillars: the 2nd 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).

Yi Wei belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Wu to Gui Mao, whose stems meet the branches from Wu to Mao and leave out Chen and Si: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 16th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences