Two animals · their fixed branch coordinates
丑巳
Ox and Snake compatibility
Ox and Snake sit 4 places apart on the twelve-branch circle. Their compatibility reading begins with that geometry, then adds the phases and trines attached to the two positions.
- Branch relation
- Shared trine
- Phase relation
- Fire generates Earth
- Circle distance
- 4 of 6 steps
The coordinates beneath the animal names
Read the two branches first
The animal is the familiar label. The branch fixes the position, phase, polarity, month, double-hour and direction used by the comparison.
丑
Ox
Chou · Yin Earth
- Circle position
- 2 of 12
- Fixed phase
- Earth
- Double-hour
- 01:00–02:59
- Month opens
- 小寒 Minor Cold
- Direction
- North-northeast
- Trine phase
- Metal
巳
Snake
Si · Yin Fire
- Circle position
- 6 of 12
- Fixed phase
- Fire
- Double-hour
- 09:00–10:59
- Month opens
- 立夏 Start of Summer
- Direction
- South-southeast
- Trine phase
- Metal
Inside both branches · 藏干
What Ox and Snake carry beneath the surface
Each Earthly Branch contains a fixed list of one to three Heavenly Stems. Comparing the two inventories shows whether this pair repeats an exact stem, shares only a phase, or keeps the two internal lists separate.
No exact stem repeats
The two fixed inventories contain no identical Heavenly Stem. Internal phase overlap: Earth · Metal.
Every matching set stays visible
The named branch relationships
Harmony, trine, meeting, clash, harm, break and punishment are different sets. A pair can appear in more than one, so no match replaces another.
Fixed branch phases · 十二支五行
Fire generates Earth
Fire, carried by the second branch, moves into Earth along the generating cycle. The direction comes from the phases even though the animal pair itself has one canonical order.
This is the phase fixed to each Earthly Branch. A birth year also has a stem phase — for example, Fire Rat or Metal Rat — which is a separate coordinate.
The three-branch groups around the pair
Both point to the Metal trine
A trine is complete only when all three of its branches are present. One or two selected animals locate positions inside that group without inventing its missing members.
Metal trine
From a year pair to a four-pillar chart
What this pair establishes — and what comes next
The comparison establishes the fixed relationship between 丑 and 巳. It does not turn two birth-year animals into a verdict about the whole relationship. In a Four Pillars chart, branches also appear at the month, day and hour layers, and each occurrence meets the rest of both charts.