Cast & Chart

Goat and Rooster

These are traditional rules about the twelve signs. No chart decides a relationship.

The traditional relations

  • 無 No listed relation

    None of the classical relations apply to this pair.

What tradition says

Two branches apart and both yin, 未 and 酉 have no named relation in the classical tables we hold. Earth bears metal, which makes 未 the supporting element and 酉 the supported one. They stand on either side of 申, with 未 in the sixth month and 酉 in the eighth.

Softness against briskness is the popular zodiac contrast for Goat and Rooster. In popular telling the Rooster corrects and the Goat sulks, a comic picture that has more to do with the animals than with any calendar rule.

How do you each like to be told that something needs fixing? Write the sentence you would want to hear, swap, and see how close the other person's guess would have been.

Support from earth to metal is how the cycle treats 未 and 酉 as signs, and whether one Goat and one Rooster support each other is a separate question.

Where this text comes from

The relation tables follow 五行大義 volume 2 and 三命通會 volumes 2 and 3 on Wikisource. The popular readings are modern and come from neither.

The English here is our own plain wording, not a translation of a single source.