Earthly Branch · Wèi
Wèi (未)
dry summer earth — Earth that stores Wood, warm and settling, the harvest ground
- Zodiac correspondence:
- Goat / Sheep / Ram
- Element:
- Earth
- Season:
- late summer
- Hours:
- 13:00–15:00
- Lunar month:
- the 6th lunar month
- Hidden stems:
- Yin Earth (己) · Yin Fire (丁) · Yin Wood (乙)
The eighth Earthly Branch — late summer, dry Earth, a Wood vault. Its zodiac animal is the Goat (also Sheep / Ram).
Overview
Wei (未) is the eighth Earthly Branch, and the rule holds: Wei is the branch; the Goat — also rendered Sheep or Ram — is the popular Chinese-zodiac animal that corresponds to it. Wei is not 'the Goat'; it is Wei, a calendrical unit, with the Goat as its familiar label.
As a branch, Wei is the dry, warm earth of late summer — the 6th lunar month, the early afternoon, the harvest ground after the heat has peaked. Its element is Earth, but a dry summer Earth: one of the four 'storage' branches, the vault where Wood is kept, holding a residue of the season's fire.
As a unit of time
As time, Wei rules 13:00–15:00 (the 未時 double-hour), the 6th lunar month at summer's close, and a south-southwest position. Its pillar placement fixes which layer of the chart this dry storage-Earth colours.
Hidden stems (藏干)
Wei's hidden stems (藏干) are Yin Earth (己) as the main qi, with Yin Fire (丁) and Yin Wood (乙). That is why Wei is the 'Wood storehouse': dry Earth on the surface, with stored Wood and the banked warmth of summer's fire buried inside. The hidden stems carry several elements at once.
Clashes, trinities, combinations
Wei's clash (六沖) is with Chou (丑, the Ox) — the two earthy storehouse branches on opposite sides of the year. It is the storage member of the Wood trinity (三合) 亥卯未 (Hai–Mao–Wei), and its six-combination (六合) is with Wu (午, the Horse). These are structural relationships between chart positions, not predictions.
Cross-system reference
| System | Closest archetype | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Zi Wei Dou Shu | One of the twelve fixed cells of a Zi Wei chart — the 未 position a palace sits on | In Zi Wei the twelve Earthly Branches are the chart's twelve fixed cells: every palace occupies a branch, and a chart's 命宮 (Life Palace) can land on 未. Its Bazi clash partner 丑 (Ox) sits in the cell directly opposite — what Zi Wei reads as the 對宮 (opposite palace) on the same axis. Same twelve branches, used as the spatial frame for the palaces, not as a Bazi pillar. |
| Chinese zodiac (生肖) | The Goat / Sheep / Ram — the popular animal label for the branch Wei | The Goat is the everyday zodiac's name for Wei (English renderings vary); the branch Wei — its Earth element, hidden Wood and Fire, time and interactions — is the technical unit a Bazi chart reads. |
| Western astrology | A loose structural parallel only — twelve divisions of a cycle | No sign maps to a branch; the branches are calendrical, not personality signs. The only parallel is the shared twelve-fold division. |
The Chinese zodiac animal is a popular label for the branch, not the branch itself, and there is no branch-to-Western-sign mapping. Cross-system anchors are a loose heuristic; an Earthly Branch is a calendrical unit with hidden stems, which neither the zodiac nor Western astrology shares.
Reading this descriptively
Wei describes a position in time and its elemental character — late-summer storage Earth — not a personality, not a destiny, and not 'you are a Goat'. It is read against the rest of the chart, and the same branch plays out very differently across different lives.
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