Lucky Numbers and Colours by Zodiac: Where They Come From

Search 'lucky number for rabbit' and you will get a different answer from each page. That is because most of those pages copy a floating table without saying where it came from.

There is a rule underneath, and once you know it you can derive the whole table yourself. It takes two steps: element to numbers, then animal to element.

Step one: numbers belong to elements

The old diagrams assign each element a pair of numbers. Water takes one and six; fire takes two and seven; wood takes three and eight; metal takes four and nine; earth takes five and ten.

The pairing is not arithmetic — one and six are not related to each other the way six and twelve are. They are positions on a diagram, and the diagram is the source.

Step two: animals belong to elements

Each animal is fixed to one element by its branch — the same table that underlies the whole system. Rat and pig are water; tiger and rabbit are wood; snake and horse are fire; monkey and rooster are metal; ox, dragon, goat and dog are earth.

Put the two steps together and the usual answer appears: the rabbit is wood, wood is three and eight, so the rabbit's numbers are 3 and 8, and its colours are the greens. The snake is fire, so 2 and 7, and red.

Why other pages disagree

Many published tables swap in the year's element instead of the branch's, or use the Lo Shu diagram rather than the original pairing. Both produce plausible-looking numbers and different answers.

There is also a genuine limitation: a fixed number for a whole animal year is a very coarse instrument. In a full chart the useful numbers come from the day master and the chart's balance, which differ from person to person in the same year.

So treat the table above as the derivable version — the one that follows the rules — rather than as a promise. For anything that actually matters, the chart is the better source.