Cast & Chart

Rooster and Dog

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

酉 and 戌 are adjacent, tenth and eleventh, and appear in 六害, the Six Harms. The Sanming Tonghui calls this pair the harm of jealousy and reasons from the triads: 戌 carries fire at its dying stage and 酉 carries metal at its height. The Wuxing Dayi glosses the whole class with a blunt word for injury, strong language for a relation between two calendar positions. Plain element logic gives a milder view, since the earth of 戌 supports the metal in 酉.

A Rooster who announces and a Dog who doubts, both of them fond of being right, are the figures in popular zodiac books. Popular charts often mark the match down, perhaps because the harm is listed. Jealousy in the old text describes fire and metal, and the popular books apply it to people on their own authority.

Envy is easier to discuss when it is named early and kindly. Is there something the other person gets, at work or among friends, that you sometimes wish were yours? Saying so in a sentence can be enough.

The word jealousy attaches to the signs 酉 and 戌 in an old chart manual, and no actual Rooster or Dog inherits 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.