Yi You · Yin Wood Rooster

Meaning

Yi You sets the flower in the Rooster’s pure Metal at mid-autumn, the season that cuts the year’s growth. The tradition reads sensitivity with a backbone, a careful, kindly exactness that thrives with warmth and shelter.

Yi over You: yin Wood over yin Metal, a stem its branch controls, as Metal controls Wood.

Yi, Yin Wood, is the vine and the flower: supple, finding its way round obstacles, thriving by what it leans on. The Rooster is observant, frank and hard-working.

The zodiac reads a Yi You year as the Wood Rooster’s. The Wood Rooster is the warm-hearted Rooster: conscientious, fair, eager to improve things for everyone. Its standards are high and kindly meant, and it does well to rest sometimes.

Its Na Yin, shared with Jia Shen, is Water from the spring (泉中水 quánzhōng shuǐ): a sound of Water, heard beside the pillar’s Wood and Metal.

In practice

• As a year, from Lichun, around 4 February: 1825, 1885, 1945, 2005, 2065, 2125 and 2185, in the 1800–2200 table.
• As a month: the Rooster month of every Yi or Geng year, opened by White Dew, as in the solar years 2020 and 2025.
• As a day, every sixty days: in 2026, on 11 January, 12 March, 11 May, 10 July, 8 September and 7 November.
• As an hour: the Rooster’s double hour, 17:00–19:00, of Yi and Geng days.
• As a day pillar, its stem is the Day Master, Yi, sitting on You, the partner palace: You holds Xin, Yi’s Seven Killings, and Yi stands at its Pause 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-tori, eulyu and Ất Dậu, with each language’s readings of 乙 and 酉.

How Ulune calculates it

Yi You is the 22nd of the sixty pillars: the 2nd of the ten stems over the 10th 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 You belongs to the ten-day week from Jia Shen to Gui Si, whose stems meet the branches from Shen to Si and leave out Wu and Wei: for a day pillar of this week, those are the empty branches. Its Na Yin is the 11th of the thirty, one for each two pillars.

Correspondences