Horoskopanalysen

The ox and its element

Two people, both born under the sign of the ox, one in 1961, the other in 1973 — and in the Chinese system they still do not stand in the same place. In this calendar a year is named by two details: below it the animal, above it a heavenly stem that carries the phase. The ox is only the lower of the two. The upper one has its say as well.

The element changes every year

Popular accounts often say that the element belongs to the animal, or moves on together with it. That is not so. Ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches run side by side, and both rows advance by exactly one place each year. Every new year therefore brings a new stem; the five phases alternate within that row, each in a firmer and a softer form.

Because ten and twelve meet only at sixty, it takes sixty years for the same pair to come round again. The ox itself arrives every twelve years, but each time under a different stem. Five passes, five oxen — and then the row starts over.

The five oxen

From there it goes on in steps of sixty years: the wood ox returns in 2045, the fire ox in 2057. All five carry the softer form of their phase, and that is not interpretation but arithmetic — the ox is the second of the twelve branches, and branches with an even number always meet stems with an even number. Anyone with a birthday in January or February, though, does better to have the assignment checked: the boundary between one year and the next runs through those weeks, and the schools draw it in different places. You will find how the calendar is built up under Chinese astrology.

What the stem does to the branch

The ox branch itself carries the earth phase. That is why a pair becomes informative only in the relation of the two halves to each other, since every phase produces another and controls a third.

In the fire ox the stem feeds the branch, because fire produces earth: warmth over ground that lies at the end of winter anyway. In the earth ox the same phase stands twice over — the theme without a counterweight, the most stable and the hardest to move. In the metal ox the branch gives to the stem, because earth produces metal: here the ground works for something that stands above it. In the water ox the branch presses on the stem, because earth controls water. And in the wood ox the pressure runs the other way, since wood controls earth.

The words feed and control sound more dramatic than they are meant to be. They describe how forces in a chart hold each other up or slow each other down — not what happens to a person.

Why the sixtieth birthday counts

The sixty-year cycle is no astrological byway, but the ordinary way of counting years in East Asia. It also explains why the sixtieth birthday is traditionally kept there on a grand scale: on it the combination of the birth year returns for the first time. A life then has one full round of the calendar behind it.

In practice this means: when someone says they are an ox, you have only the one half of the detail. The other costs nothing but a glance at the year of birth — and it separates five oxen that lie a good way apart in interpretation. The calendar repeats itself more slowly than the twelve animals suggest.