The ox

The ox — also called the buffalo — is the second of the twelve earthly branches.

Its place in the cycle

• Phase: earth
• Season: late winter — the passage into spring
• Double hour: 1 to 3 a.m.
• Direction: north-northeast
• Linked with: snake and rooster — the metal group of three
• Facing: the goat

Like the dragon, the goat and the dog, the ox stands at the end of a season and therefore carries the earth phase — the keeping principle, the one that mediates between two states.

What tradition hands down

Endurance, reliability, hard work, staying power — and the other side of it: stubbornness, heaviness, difficulty with sudden turns and with contradiction.

In East Asian tradition the ox is an unreservedly positive sign: the animal that pulls the plough and thereby makes the harvest possible. The German expression about the stubborn ox has no part in it.

What the year animal is worth

The coarsest of the four pillars. A complete chart is made of year, month, day and hour; the day pillar counts as the sign of the person themselves. The heavenly stem is part of it — an earth ox and a metal ox differ markedly in interpretation.

Checking the start of the year

Between late January and mid-February the animal changes, and the schools reckon differently. See the Chinese calendar.

See also: Chinese astrology, the rooster.