Eastern Beast
Your animal and element in the sixty-year cycle, measured from the true lunar new year rather than 1 January.
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The Year Does Not Turn in January
Almost every casual reference to the Chinese zodiac gets one thing wrong: the animal year does not begin on 1 January. It begins at the lunar new year, which falls somewhere between late January and the third week of February.
Anyone born inside that window belongs to the previous animal. A birthday on 20 January 2000 is a Rabbit rather than a Dragon, because the Dragon year had not started. A table keyed to the calendar year hands those people the wrong animal every time.
This instrument uses the real dates, which is why it asks for your birth year rather than assuming it. Where your date falls before that year's turning, it says so on the result instead of adjusting silently.
Animal, Element and Polarity
The animal is half of it. Each year also carries one of five elements — metal, water, wood, fire, earth — with each element covering two consecutive years, which is what stretches the full cycle to sixty rather than twelve.
That is why a Metal Horse and a Fire Horse are treated as different things despite sharing an animal. For most people the exact combination does not recur in a lifetime; it returns once every sixty years.
Polarity follows the year's parity, even years yang and odd years yin. It is the most mechanical part of the reading and is included for completeness rather than because much is usually built on it.
A Separate System Entirely
This is not the zodiac the rest of the site uses. Western astrology tracks the Sun through twelve signs within a single year; the Chinese cycle assigns one animal to a whole year and repeats every twelve.
They are unrelated traditions with unrelated machinery and there is no meaningful conversion between them. Being a Leo tells you nothing about your animal, and the reverse holds just as firmly.
Reading both is fine. What is not fine is the common trick of blending them into one composite and presenting the result as though either tradition endorsed it.
The Range We Will Answer For
The lunar new year is computed from the Moon rather than fixed to the calendar, so its dates cannot be derived from a simple rule. They are held here as a verified table covering 1930 to 2040.
A date outside that span returns a plain refusal rather than an answer. Extrapolating would produce a confident-looking result that fails for exactly the January and February birthdays this instrument exists to get right.
Inside the range the answer is exact, and it will disagree with any source counting from 1 January. Where it does, the disagreement is the entire point of the tool.