Cast & Chart

Snake and Dog

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 positions divide 巳 from 戌, the sixth from the eleventh, and the classical tables leave the pair empty. 巳 is yin fire and 戌 is yang earth, so the generating cycle applies, with fire making earth. A small crossing shows up in the triads: 戌 stands in the fire group although it is earth, and 巳, a fire branch, stands in the metal group. They are the fourth and ninth months.

Popular zodiac books set a Snake who reads the room against a Dog who wants everything said plainly, and popular charts usually rate them somewhere near average. Those ratings have a modern source, because the classical passages we hold are silent on this pairing.

Tact and bluntness each have a case. Think of a time one of you held something back to be kind, and ask the other whether they would rather have heard it.

An empty table entry means 巳 and 戌 are two signs without a classical label, and the Snake and Dog in your life owe nothing to a rating.

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.