Seyun — the year

Where daeun sets the decade, seyun sets the year inside it. Each calendar year has its own pair of characters, the same for everybody — and lands completely differently depending on the chart it hits.

Read against two things at once

A year is judged against your birth chart and against your current decade simultaneously. A Fire year arriving on a Fire-starved chart in a Fire decade is a very different event from the same year arriving on a chart already overloaded with it.

This is why generic year-ahead horoscopes are close to meaningless in this system. "It is a Fire Horse year" is a fact about the calendar, not about you.

What a year can do

Years interact with your existing characters through the relationships in chapter eight. A year can clash with one of your branches, forcing movement. It can combine with one, binding something that was previously active. It can supply the element your chart most lacks, or pile more onto what it already has too much of.

The practical output is not "good year" or "bad year". It is more like: this year applies pressure to the part of your chart that governs work, and relieves pressure on the part that governs relationships.

The year still turns in February

Worth repeating, because it catches people every time: the Saju year turns at Ipchun in early February, not on 1 January. A reading for "next year" that begins on New Year's Day is using the wrong boundary for the first five weeks of it.