Animal Fortunes for 2012, the Year of the Water Dragon

The Year of Sudden Change

“Your advice to me precisely (as to) when the downturn would occur and when (property prices) would pick up was bang on. ”
Naomie Harris, star of Pirates of the Caribbean, Small Island, White Teeth

On this page………….click on your animal to go straight to your character and forecast!

Rabbit:        1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999
Dragon:      1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000.

Snake:        1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001.
Horse:        1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002.

Sheep:       1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003.
Monkey:      1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004.

Rooster:     1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005.
Dog:            1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006.

Pig:              1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007.
Rat:             1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008.

Ox:               1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997, 2009.
Tiger:          1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010.

You’re more than an Animal!
It’s both fatuous and inaccurate to define someone born, say, in the year of the Horse, as spontaneous, superficial and extrovert or someone born in a Dog year as stolid. It’s fatuous because we all have choice and we are something other than the shape we were born into. All sorts of idiot prejudices follow from variations of that dogma. You might as well say that all French people smell of garlic or that obesity is a function of laziness.

It’s inaccurate because the ba zi or Four Pillars from which an individual’s Year Animal is drawn, consists as the name implies, of Four Animals: the Animal (technically known as a branch) of the Year as well as that of the Month, Day and Hour. Your ba zi is a snapshot of the prevailing energies at the precise moment of your birth. When we start to factor in your other three Animals we get some sort of picture.

It doesn’t matter much by the way, whether we buy into the idea of the Five Elements, yin and yang or the Tao. Through the prism of the Tao, the process, the flow, the Great Principle, it becomes less important whether an idea is true or accurate than whether it is useful.
So it may be that the Horse singled out above was born in the Month of the Monkey, the Day of the Rabbit and the Hour of the Sheep. Taken together the characteristics of these Animals start to tell us something useful. This person has qualities of playfulness, domesticity and idealism to mitigate the in-the-moment and in-your-face of the Horse. Like human beings, the picture is a bit more complex as we look more deeply.

How to use these forecasts:
All of this is by way of preamble to the brief Animal Fortunes for 2012, The Water Dragon, the Year of Sudden Change, set out below. Feng shui is doing the right thing in the right place at the right time which makes it a very personalised activity. We are all different. But if you want to make serious use of these homilies, look out your hour of birth as well as the month and year and you may start to get some indications of the year in store that are not ridiculously simplistic. Perhaps take the three forecasts and print them out together, read them once with care and then take five minutes to review in your head what you recall. Then put the printout somewhere safe where you can find it and perhaps 24 hours later, take it out and look again. Do this once a month or so and you may start to find it reflecting the facts and more to the point, helping you navigate the situations that arise.

The Year Animal broadly relates to heritage, the Month Animal to work and the Hour Animal to children and expression. Ba zi is of course a thousand times more complex than that and perversely enough, the most important Chinese characters relate to the Animal of the day of your birth which you’ll only find by consulting a 10,000 Year Calendar. If you ask me nicely, I’ll look it up for you though.

So set out here are some very brief forecasts Animal by Animal for the year. Forgive their brevity and their bluntness and remember that you are an awful lot more complex, more unique and more precious than any number of Zodiac Animals. And above all, remember always that we all retain choice.

Finally if you think that the Elements and yin and yang are random Eastern inscrutabilities, I can’t think why you’ve read this far but a moment’s consideration of the sequence of the seasons of the year or of the hours of the day underlines the historical fact that these conclusions were derived from observation of nature not the imagination. Nonetheless, I offer these sketches not because I think they are true or false but because they may be useful.
Richard Ashworth, Godalming, December 2011