Cast & Chart

Tiger and Goat

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

五行大義 names 未 as the place where wood dies, and 寅 is itself a wood branch, yet the Tiger belongs to the fire group and never enters the wood group. That is an odd near-connection, and the classical tables list nothing for the pair. Five steps separate them, and in plain element terms wood parts earth, with 未 as the earth.

Popular zodiac books tend to call the Tiger a protector and the Goat a sensitive homebody, and some rate the fit better than others. 論衡 mentions goats among the creatures a tiger subdues in an argument about elements, and that argument has no place in any rating of people.

Protection can be welcome or suffocating depending on who is asked. The one being looked after could say when help actually helped, and the one helping could say what it is like when help gets waved away. Your own examples will show where that line falls.

Any protective Tiger or sensitive Goat is a figure from modern books, and the person across from you has not agreed to be one.

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.