Reading The Animal And Element

In Chinese folk astrology a year is read first through its animal and then adjusted by its element. The rooster's crow, marking the boundary between night and dawn, gives it a place in Chinese folk religion as a ward against darkness, painted on doors and gates beside the tiger. Rooster years are read as industrious and exacting. The element modifies that base reading: in the five phase (Wu Xing) system Metal governs the west, the color white, the season of autumn and the virtue of righteousness. A Metal year is traditionally read as a season for consolidation and firm decision; Metal is held to feed Water and to be held in check by Fire.

Put together, 1921 reads in the folk tradition as a Rooster year with a Metal cast, Metal's firmness tempering the animal's own temperament rather than replacing it. The same twelve animal cycle, adapted with local variation, also orders the traditional calendars of Vietnam, where the rabbit is usually read as a cat, and of Japan, where the pig is usually read as a boar; the underlying stem and element layer that gives 1921 its Metal cast specifically is a Chinese addition that these neighboring traditions do not all keep in the same form. Older reckonings also put the same twelve branches to work outside the calendar of years: the same order once named the twelve double hours of the day and the twelve compass points, so Rooster marks a direction and a stretch of the clock in those older systems as well as this year.