Three of November's Top Four Signs Flip on the 7th

The Taiwanese outlet NOWnews reported yesterday on a monthly zodiac ranking by the feng shui practitioner Zheng Weijian, carried originally in his Sohu column. It scores the signs out of 100 and names four: the Pig first on 95, then the Tiger on 92, the Rabbit on 91 and the Ox on 89. A second piece, published on October 22 by the Chinese-language site Astrobazi, ranks the same month on a five-star scale and puts the Tiger first instead, on the strength of the Tiger's six-harmony with the incoming month.

Two columns, one month, two different signs crowned. That on its own proves little — practitioners differ, and there is no single authority here to be wrong about. What is worth checking is narrower and does not need anybody to be an authority: whether a single score for November can mean what it looks like it means.

The month the score is for

Give both reports their due first, because in this genre the next part is usually where things go wrong, and neither of them went wrong there. Astrobazi states outright that November 1 to 7 still belong to the preceding solar month and that the new one opens at the Start of Winter on November 7. The NOWnews piece notes the same turn on the same date, and names the new month pillar correctly.

This site derives those boundaries rather than looking them up, and it agrees. Run our own calendar code over the dates and November 2 — today — still falls in the Dog month, the one Cold Dew opened on October 8. On November 7 the branch changes to the Pig, and it stays there until Major Snow on December 7. The month pillar for the incoming month is the Earth Pig, inside the Yang Fire Horse year. All of that checks out against both reports.

Which is exactly the problem with giving November a number. The two reports know the month changes partway through; the score does not. It is attached to a calendar month that the system underneath it does not recognize as a unit.

What happens to the top four on the 7th

Branch relations are a small closed system, which is what makes them worth checking: every sign either stands in a named relation to a given branch or it does not, and the whole answer can be written out. Run this site's own pairing code over the four signs the ranking names, against both of the months November actually contains, and three of the four do not hold still.

The Pig, ranked first on 95, has no named relation to the Dog month at all. From November 7 it is in its own sign, which is also one of the four self-punishment branches — the hardest reading this layer gives. The Ox, ranked fourth on 89, moves the opposite way: it is in a punishment with the Dog month and has no relation to the Pig month whatever, so on this layer its month improves on the 7th rather than worsening. The Tiger, ranked second on 92, is in a clean trine with the Dog month, and from the 7th it is in a six-harmony and a break with the Pig month simultaneously — the one genuinely mixed case in the set, and the relation Astrobazi cites for putting the Tiger first, counted without the break that the same table assigns to the same pair.

That leaves the Rabbit, on 91. It is in six-harmony with the Dog month and in the trine with the Pig month: two different favorable relations, one either side of the boundary, and nothing hard on either. Of the four signs named, it is the only one favorable for the whole of November on this layer, and it is ranked third — behind two signs that each carry something hard for part of the month they are being scored for.

What a 95 claims

The scores are the part worth dwelling on, because they are doing something the systems underneath them cannot. The branch layer returns four answers and only four: favorable, mixed, hard, or no named relation. It is a set of discrete verdicts, not a continuum. Nothing in it distinguishes a 95 from a 91, and nothing in it ranks two signs that both have no relation to the month at all.

A score invites a reader to act on a four-point difference, and the four points are the part with nothing behind them. The report's own sentence about the Pig is modest enough on its face:

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connections and work experience built up in the past have a chance to pay off

There is nothing to object to in that. It is the 95 above it that says more than anybody can show — and it is the number, not the sentence, that gets quoted into a headline and read as a finding.

This site publishes no scores, and that is a decision rather than an omission. Our own pairing code returns one of four verdicts and refuses to add them up, because a number would claim a precision none of these traditions offer. Where a reading depends on something we cannot compute, the tool says so instead of guessing.

None of which makes the Rabbit's November good or the Pig's bad. The branch layer is one layer, and a thin one on its own — your own reading depends on a birth date, and on which of the four auspicious directions is yours, neither of which a sign-wide ranking can know. What it can do is tell you where a published number stops being derived, and in this case that is at the number itself.

If you want the part that is checkable, the months-ahead chapter of our personal reading runs the next three solar months against your own birth branch, names the relation in each, and shows the derivation. It will not give you 95 out of 100. There is nothing to compute it from.