The twelve animals

Everybody knows the twelve animals, and almost nobody knows what they are: not a zodiac in the Western sense, which is a belt of stars, but twelve names for the twelve earthly branches, the cycle of twelve on which the Chinese calendar counts its hours, its months, its years and, on the luopan, its directions. The Four Pillars essay gives the branches as the diviner uses them; this one gives them as a household meets them, which is through the year’s animal and the three sectors of the compass the almanac asks a household to leave alone while the year lasts. It gives the ring on which the animal, the hour, the month and the direction are one arrangement, the six clashes across it, the afflictions of the year computed for the next twelve years so that a reader can check them against any almanac, where the animals came from and what they are not, and the one thing a birth animal has to do with a house, which is less than the paperbacks say and more than nothing.

One ring, four readings

Drag sideways to see the whole drawing

The ring above is the calendar’s and the compass’s at once, and reading it four ways is the whole of what the animals are. Each of the twelve branches, Zi to Hai, carries an animal, and the animals run sunwise from the Rat at the top: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig. Each branch is also a double hour of the day, and the Rat is midnight, eleven at night to one, with the Horse at noon and the Rabbit and the Rooster at sunrise and sunset; a traditional day began at the Rat hour, which is why the almanac’s day and the clock’s do not quite agree. Each branch is a month, and here the ring turns once: the Rat is the eleventh month, the month of the winter solstice, and the Tiger is the first, because the first month holds the start of spring, so that the year begins two branches after the sun’s low point, at the same place on the ring where the solar terms essay begins it. And each branch is a direction, the one the luopan gives it on its ring of twenty-four mountains, the Rat at true north, the Horse at south, the Rabbit east and the Rooster west, with the eight other branches at the thirty-degree intervals between, which is why a year has a direction and a direction has a year. The animals are the mnemonic and the branches are the thing; Needham traces the branches to the Shang oracle bones a thousand years before any animal was attached to them, and Bodde finds the animals attached by the Han, borrowed, most scholars think, from the nomads of the north with whom the Han traded and fought. A person born in a Tiger year has the Tiger in the year pillar of the Four Pillars, one of eight characters, and the popular horoscope reads a twelfth of the population by that one character, which the diviner never did.

The year’s animal, and the three quiet sectors

Drag sideways to see the whole drawing

The one place the animals touch a house directly is the year, and the table above computes what the almanac prints for the next twelve years, so that a reader can check the rules against the book and the book against the rules. The year’s animal is the year’s branch, and the branch’s direction on the ring is the Tai Sui, the Grand Duke of the year, a sector of fifteen degrees that the almanac asks a household not to dig in, not to build in and not to turn its back on, which the glossary gives and Walters and Skinner explain as the oldest of the year’s afflictions, a Han astrological idea attached to Jupiter’s twelve-year orbit and kept after Jupiter was forgotten. The Sui Po, the year-breaker, is the sector opposite, where the clash of the year falls, and the same rule holds there. The Three Killings, san sha, are the third affliction and the one most often computed wrongly in the paperbacks: they sit in the quarter opposite the year’s trine, the three branches that stand a third of a ring apart and are read as allies, so that the Monkey, Rat and Dragon years, whose trine points north, strike the south, the Tiger, Horse and Dog years the north, the Pig, Rabbit and Goat years the west and the Snake, Rooster and Ox years the east; the table’s column follows that rule. The fourth column is not the animals’ at all but the Lo Shu essay’s: the annual Five Yellow, the palace the star five lands in when the year’s ruling star is flown from the centre, which the Compass schools add to the almanac’s three to make the year’s four. What the four ask is one thing, and the tradition was clear about it: no building work in those sectors that year, no digging, no wall opened, no drain moved, and Bruun’s villagers and Emmons’s Hong Kong households kept the rule for foundations and ignored it for furniture. The site reads it the same way. A bed or a desk in the Tai Sui’s sector is not the work the almanac meant, and a household that has been told to move its sofa for the Grand Duke has been sold a rule the almanac did not write. The same four sectors for forty-eight years, computed by the same rules rather than copied from a printed table, are on the year page.

Where the animals came from, and what they are not

The twelve are older than their names. The branches appear on the oracle bones of the Shang as a cycle for counting days, paired with the ten stems into the sixty-day cycle that Needham calls the oldest continuous count in the world, and for a thousand years they had no animals; the sequence Rat to Pig is first found complete in a Han tomb text of the first century before Christ, and Bodde, with most of the scholars since, reads it as borrowed, since the same twelve in the same order turn up among the Turkic and Mongol peoples of the steppe and in the Buddhist calendars of Central Asia, so that the animals probably came into China with the horse and went out again with the calendar to Japan, Korea and Vietnam, where the Rabbit is a Cat. The animals are not a zodiac. The Western zodiac is a belt of twelve constellations along the sun’s path, and its signs are months; the twelve animals are branches, and the year animal is the least of them, a twelfth of the calendar that happens to be the twelfth people remember. They are not, in the tradition, characters: the manuals of the Four Pillars read the year’s branch for its element and its clashes and say nothing about tigers being brave, and the animal personalities are a modern popular growth, which Smith dates to the almanacs of the nineteenth century and the newspapers of the twentieth. They are not a school of feng shui. Feuchtwang’s survey of the manuals finds the branches on the luopan as directions and in the almanac as dates, and finds no method that reads a house by the household’s animals; the animals reach the house through the year, and only through the year, as the table above shows. What they are is a good mnemonic for a cycle of twelve that a household meets every day, at the hour, and every year, at the spring festival, when the paper animal goes up on the door and the almanac says which sector to leave alone.

Drag sideways to see the whole drawing

The twelve animals, in order

1. The branch first. Each animal is a branch, and the branch is an hour, a month, a year and a direction on one ring, sunwise from the Rat at north and midnight.
2. The clash. Opposite animals across the ring: the matchmaker’s pairing to avoid, the day-selector’s day to strike out.
3. The year’s animal. Its direction is the Tai Sui; the opposite sector is the Sui Po; the quarter opposite the year’s trine holds the Three Killings; the Lo Shu adds the Five Yellow.
4. What the four ask. No building work, digging or wall opened in those sectors that year; furniture is not the work the almanac meant.
5. The year begins at the spring festival. A January birth is the previous animal; the table and the almanac both count so.
6. What the animal is not. Not a zodiac, not a character, not a school, not a direction for the bed.
7. On the door. The year’s animal in red paper for the month, facing the street.