Cast & Chart

Rat and Goat

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

The traditional relations

  • 六害 Six Harms

    One of six pairs of branches the old tables list as harming each other. The name is a label, not a forecast.

What tradition says

六害, the Six Harms, is the name for the link between 子 and 未, and 五行大義 glosses the word plainly as injury. 三命通會 offers two accounts. One calls 未 strong earth set against strong water, a harm of powerful houses. The other says 子 dreads the clash of 午 while 未 goes off to join 午 in harmony.

Many popular zodiac books show the Goat as mild and the Rat as shrewd, and they expect small misunderstandings over money and feelings. Popular lists do rank this pairing low, though the ranking itself is modern.

The second account is about loyalty, since one party feels that the other has sided with a third. That opens a plain conversation about friends or relatives whom one of you finds hard going. Ask whether either of you has felt left on the wrong side of such a friendship.

Harm in this table is a label for how 子 and 未 are arranged, and we make no claim that any Rat can hurt any Goat or the reverse.

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.