Cast & Chart

Rat and Snake

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

Five steps separate 子 from 巳, one short of the direct opposite, and the classical tables in our sources record no relation for the pair. 子 is yang and lies in the north, while 巳 is yin and lies in the south. In the fixed elements this is water and fire, and water quenches fire, a link that a speaker quoted in 論衡 also draws when assigning these animals their elements.

In popular zodiac writing the Rat talks its way through a room and the Snake watches from the edge of it. Many popular charts treat the two as a decent intellectual match and leave it there. Those ratings have no classical basis that we can point to.

Watching and talking make a good subject. Ask each other how you know when the other is upset, and whether those signals are getting through. The quenching image raises a small practical test as well: does one person's quick reply cool the other's idea before it has been heard out?

Water over fire is an old sorting of the elements, and it has no say in how a real Rat and a real Snake treat each other.

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.