Cast & Chart

Rat and Rooster

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

The traditional relations

  • 相破 Mutual Breaking

    A pair of branches the old tables list as breaking each other. The name is a label, not a forecast.

What tradition says

相破, Mutual Breaking, joins 子 and 酉 in the four-pair list kept by 三命通會. 五行大義 has no separate list of this kind, so the relation rests on one witness here. The name says that each branch is held to break the other, and the passage lists the pair without explaining it. Three steps lie between them, and 子 and 酉 are each the height of an element group, water and metal.

In popular zodiac writing the Rooster is precise and outspoken while the Rat is canny and private, and charts often foresee squabbles over details. Such charts are modern and offer no source for the forecast.

Two high points a quarter of the circle apart suggest two people who are each used to being the authority on something. Try asking which subjects belong to whom, and what happens when a correction comes from the other side. Exactness, the trait popular books give the Rooster, may land harder than it was meant to.

Breaking is a single old text's word for how 子 and 酉 relate, so let it stay with the signs and leave the two of you out of it.

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.