Cast & Chart

Rat and Monkey

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

The traditional relations

  • 三合 Three Harmonies

    Two members of a trio of branches that tradition groups together.

What tradition says

The Monkey's 申 opens the water group 申子辰 and the Rat's 子 is its crest, so these two hold the first and second stages of this set among the 三合, the Three Harmonies. 三命通會 names 申 the birth of water and 子 its height, and 五行大義 places the same two in the west and the north. 辰, the Dragon, would complete the set, and the text holds that two of three do not make the group.

Popular zodiac books love this pair and call them two quick minds who enjoy each other's tricks. 論衡 records a stranger claim, raised as a puzzle: monkeys fear rats, yet the rat counts as water and the monkey as metal, and water is not said to defeat metal. That oddity has nothing to do with the love match, which is popular tradition alone.

Metal carries water in the cycle of elements, and here the branch of water's birth is itself a metal branch. Consider asking who tends to start things and who gets them running at full strength. Two people who enjoy being clever may also want to agree on where cleverness stops and frankness begins.

A shared group on the calendar wheel marks a kinship of two branches, and the people who happen to carry them are free to differ entirely.

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.