The Fire Pig

general summary for a person born in a Fire Pig year of the Chinese calendar; outside astronomy

What the tradition reads

The Chinese zodiac is a calendrical tradition rather than an astronomical one, kept in this corpus as its own labelled system and never folded into a sun sign or a placement it happens to sit beside: it runs on the lunisolar calendar rather than on the ecliptic, and a year's animal and element are fixed by the date of the lunar new year, not by any planet's position. The twelve year animal cycle combines with the five element cycle, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, each element holding for two consecutive years, to make a full cycle of sixty years before the same animal and element pairing recurs. The Pig, twelfth and last of the twelve animals, is read in the tradition through the shape of its own founding story: an appetite for comfort, food and rest that is easy to mistake for simple laziness, since the animal that stopped to eat and then fell asleep along the way still crossed the river and still took the place given to it. The tradition reads this generously, an ease with comfort rather than any failure of will, since the Pig finished the race it was in no hurry to win. Fire, the element of high summer and of ripening warmth, is read as kindling the Pig's ease into something quicker and more urgent, a brighter, more animated version of the same quality that is warmer to be around but readier to flare.

The story

Just as the Jade Emperor was about to end the race, an oink sounded in the distance: it was the Pig. Feeling hungry partway across, the Pig had stopped to eat, then fallen asleep, waking only afterward to finish the crossing in twelfth and last place. The tradition tells this without much reproach, since the Pig still arrived and still claimed the year named for it. Fire, the element paired with this particular Pig year, comes from the Wu Xing, the five phase system used across Chinese thought for cycles of generation and control: Fire is placed in the south and in high summer, a period of fruition and ripening flowering associated with heat, generated by Wood as fuel and, in the same cycle, giving rise to Earth's ash. The Pig and the Snake stand directly opposite one another in the twelve year wheel, six years apart, and the tradition names that particular pairing one of the six clashes, the oppositions across the cycle it considers most likely to produce friction rather than ease.

Written from

Corpus key chinese:Fire-Pig.