Also known as: Rooster Branch
You is yin metal, hidden stem 辛 alone — pure refined metal. It is the rooster at sundown, the equinox, the cardinal west. You Day Masters carry an air of precision, punctuality, articulate speech, and intolerance for sloppy work. They are natural editors, jewelers, surgeons, accountants — anyone whose value depends on getting the smallest detail exactly right.
You san-he with 巳 and 丑 transforms to metal (巳酉丑合化金), and six-unites with 辰 (辰酉合金). Conflicted by 卯 (卯酉冲), self-punished (酉酉自刑), and broken with 戌 (酉戌相害).
The graph 酉 is a wine jar. That is why 酒 wine, 酌 to pour, 醬 fermented paste and the full form of 醫 medicine all carry it as their element, and why the Shuowen Jiezi explains the eighth month as the time when millet ripens and can be brewed into strong ale. The Records of the Grand Historian reads You as things grown old. The sovereign hexagram for the month is Guan (觀 Guān), four yin lines below two yang — the posture of looking on from above while the year visibly withdraws.
You is one of only three branches with a single hidden stem — Zi holds Gui alone, Mao holds Yi alone, You holds Xin alone — and this purity does most of the interpretive work. Xin metal has its prosperity seat here and Geng its imperial seat, so the You month is metal at full strength and unmixed. A metal Day Master born in You is rooted to the point of hardness, and classical practice then asks for fire to shape it or water to let it flow rather than for more metal.
Three cautions. You is not jewellery: Xin metal in classical description is closer to frost, to a blade's edge, or to the finished precision of a made thing than it is to ornament, and the wealth associations are a modern gloss. The You month begins at Bailu, not at the autumn equinox, which falls in its middle as the zhongqi. And calling doubled You self-punishing does not mean self-harm is fated; the older texts use the term for a tension internal to one element, and a chart may or may not express it. Beyond those three, not everything about You is settled. Most tables give it Xin alone, but the day-division method in some texts assigns the opening days of the month to Geng, which would make You less pure than the standard account. Whether the Chen–You union genuinely transforms into metal, or merely binds the two branches, is disputed in the same way as every other six-union. And a minority of lineages drop the self-punishment category altogether, holding that it duplicates what clash and punishment already cover. The peach-blossom label is another: Bazi and Ziwei Doushu use it differently, so a reading that invokes it should say which system it draws on.
Beyond the metal frame, the Chen union, the Mao clash, the self-punishment and the Xu harm already listed, You breaks with Zi; it is also the peach-blossom seat for charts anchored on Shen, Zi or Chen. The Mao clash carries extra weight in the older literature because Mao and You mark sunrise and sunset, treated in the technical texts as the doors through which the day and the year pass, an opposition of direction more than of simple strength.
The You month runs from Bailu (白露 Báilù) to Hanlu (寒露 Hánlù) and holds the autumn equinox. Pentad almanacs of the Yueling tradition record thunder withdrawing its voice, hibernating creatures sealing their burrows, and standing water beginning to dry. On the compass You is due west; the You hour, 17:00 to 19:00, is sunset, which is where the rooster image comes from — the bird that announces the boundary of light. Harvest, brewing and the settling of the year's accounts all belong, in the old almanacs, to this branch.
You is yin metal and stores only Xin, which makes it the purest metal branch and the classical image of refined, finished metal: precision, edge, exactness. Shen is yang metal and stores Geng, Ren and Wu, so it reads as raw metal with water and earth moving inside it, associated with mechanism and motion. You is one of the four cardinal seats; Shen is a travelling-horse branch. As for the season, You is mid-autumn, Xin metal holds its prosperity seat there and Geng its imperial seat, so metal does command the month. But season is only one input. Traditional method weighs the month against the Day Master, the other three pillars and the stems above before calling anything strong, and a chart with a metal month can still be read as metal-deficient if nothing else supports it.
The Mao–You pair is the east–west opposition, wood against metal, sunrise against sunset, and the older texts give it particular weight because these two branches were treated as the doors of the day and the year. What is actually read is which side has support: metal in autumn usually has the season, wood usually does not, and where the clash falls matters too, since a year–month clash and a day–hour clash are referred to different areas of life. The Chen–You six-union is listed as producing metal, so in that reading You is not weakened but confirmed. The wider question, whether a six-union genuinely transforms the pair or only binds them, is unsettled. The common practical convention is that transformation needs support from the rest of the chart, especially from the stems above; without it the two branches are read as tied to each other, each still contributing its own element.
Because 酉 originally pictured a wine vessel rather than a bird. The component survives in 酒 (wine), 酌 (to pour), 醬 (fermented paste) and the full form of 醫 (medicine), all of which involve fermenting or decanting. The Shuowen Jiezi keeps this sense by explaining the eighth month as the time grain ripens for brewing. The rooster association belongs to the later scheme that matched the twelve branches with animals.