1953

1953 carries the identity Gui-Si in the Chinese sexagenary calendar, the Water Snake year, its start set by which lunar new year falls inside this Gregorian year rather than by the Gregorian date itself. The system runs two cycles at once: ten heavenly stems, each stem carrying one of five elements across a paired Yang year and Yin year, and twelve earthly branches, each branch carrying one of the familiar zodiac animals. The two cycles advance together, one stem and one branch each year, and because ten and twelve share a lowest common multiple of sixty, the full pairing of stem, branch and element returns only once every sixty years rather than every twelve. This particular pairing, Gui-Si, last named a year in 1893 and will not do so again until 2013.

The sixty term cycle is older than its zodiac branches alone: it was used to count days as well as years in the earliest Chinese calendars, and its year form still sets the date of the Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean lunar new year, underlies Bazi ("four pillars") fortune telling, which reads a person's stem and branch at birth, month, day and hour together, and paces the lunar timing of some ancestor veneration and temple rites that do not follow the solar calendar.

In Chinese folk astrology a year is read first through its animal and then adjusted by its element. Sometimes called the little dragon, the snake is read as introspective and wise rather than dangerous. Southern Chinese folk religion ties it to household guardian spirits and to the shedding, renewing quality of its own skin. The element modifies that base reading: in the five phase (Wu Xing) system Water governs the north, the color black or dark blue, the season of winter and the virtue of wisdom. A Water year is traditionally read as reflective and quietly forceful; Water is held to feed Wood and to be held in check by Earth.

Put together, 1953 reads in the folk tradition as a Snake year with a Water cast, Water's depth 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 1953 its Water 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 Snake marks a direction and a stretch of the clock in those older systems as well as this year.