Today by zodiac

Find your animal — birth years 1936 to 2031

Every animal owns one of the five elements, and that fixed element is the one this page compares today's day-pillar element against. Find your year in the birth-years column to see which animal and which element are yours.

The table splits the years by calendar year alone. If you were born in January or the first days of February, your animal is the previous year's whenever the birth falls before Lichun (around 3 to 5 February) — /reading works that boundary out from your real birth date and time.

What sets the tone is not the animal on its own but the way two elements meet: the element of today's day pillar and the element fixed to your animal. That meeting can land in a handful of ways — the two are the same element, today's feeds your animal's, your animal's feeds today's, today's controls your animal's, or your animal's controls today's. The reading starts from the meeting, not from the animal alone.

Because it starts from that meeting, animals that share an element are handed the same tier and the same lines beneath the opening one on the same day — word for word, not merely alike. The opening line is the one exception: it is drawn from 3 possible openings using your animal together with the date, so two animals of one element usually open with different words. The branches in the table above do not split the elements evenly: earth holds 4 of them while every other element holds 2, which the element column shows at a glance.

This screen asks for the animal and nothing else — no birth time, no gender, no name. So everyone born under the same animal reads the same lines today, and what changes the reading is the day, not the person. A full chart, narrowed to one person, is what /reading is for.

The heavenly stem (天干) of the day pillar turns one full round every 10 days, and the element is read off that stem — so the tone your animal is given comes back on a 10-day rhythm, not a weekly, monthly or yearly one.