The Year of the Monkey

Personally, I don’t believe in astrological hocus-pocus.  As the man said, “The fault, … is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, … .”  However, I do love the concept.

Yesterday was the beginning of Chinese New Year (a seven day celebration.) Chinese New Year is calculated as the second new moon after the Winter Solstice, and that’s why it moves around on the Gregorian (European) calendar.  Anyway, we are now in the Year of the Monkey — to be more precise, the year of the Fire Monkey.  Chinese astrology actually includes five “Earthly Elements” (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water) as well as the 12 yearly ones, so it’s really based on 60 not 12.  (There’s a Yin and Yang thrown in there too, but I’m not sure how that works.)  People born in the Year of the Monkey have certain unique and admirable traits and abilities.  It’s all very complicated, but the bottom line is ancient Chinese scholars were trying to explain human existence by looking for patterns in time.

Humans love patterns, repetition, symmetry — it’s in our DNA — and we’re obsessed with “What the hell are we doing here?”  So, it’s only natural that, when our ancestors starting seeing patterns in time, they saw parallels to the things around them.  The Sun, the Moon, the stars and the seasons seem to govern the instinctive behaviour of every other species on the planet (birds fly south, bears hibernate etc,) so why not apply them to people?  To them, it made perfect sense that if the leaves fall from the trees every time Orion is in one particular part of the sky, that should have some effect on humans, as well.  Nice try!  The fundamental mistake our stupid ancestors made was connecting the dots that didn’t exist.  The rhythms of our planet are all part of one infinitely complicated system which is governed by — uh — for want of a better term — God only knows.  The Sun, the Moon, the stars and the seasons are just one part of it — they don’t run the show.

Having said all that, I was once told:

The Wood Horse has a good and satisfying nature. They can communicate well with others and are able to talk intelligently on many different subjects. They are hard and thorough workers, and are held in very high esteem by their friends and work colleagues.

People often seek the Wood Horses’ ideas because of their very imaginative nature; they can come up with some very original and practical ideas. Wood Horses can be very generous people and often enjoy helping others out, when possible.

The Wood Horse is an extremely lovely person and usually has a massive number of friends and admirers. They love to meet new people and will always be at a party or large social gathering, as they love being the centre of attention.

Yeah, that sounds about right.