1978

1978 carries the identity Wu-Wu in the Chinese sexagenary calendar, the Earth Horse year, its start set by which lunar new year falls inside this Gregorian year rather than by the Gregorian date itself. The system runs two cycles at once: ten heavenly stems, each stem carrying one of five elements across a paired Yang year and Yin year, and twelve earthly branches, each branch carrying one of the familiar zodiac animals. The two cycles advance together, one stem and one branch each year, and because ten and twelve share a lowest common multiple of sixty, the full pairing of stem, branch and element returns only once every sixty years rather than every twelve. This particular pairing, Wu-Wu, last named a year in 1918 and will not do so again until 2038.

The sixty term cycle is older than its zodiac branches alone: it was used to count days as well as years in the earliest Chinese calendars, and its year form still sets the date of the Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean lunar new year, underlies Bazi ("four pillars") fortune telling, which reads a person's stem and branch at birth, month, day and hour together, and paces the lunar timing of some ancestor veneration and temple rites that do not follow the solar calendar. The Gregorian year carried its own religious history quite apart from the sexagenary count: 1978 was the year the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints extended priesthood ordination to men of all races, and the year Peoples Temple members died at Jonestown in Guyana.

In Chinese folk astrology a year is read first through its animal and then adjusted by its element. The horse carries associations of speed, the open road, and the war horse and postal courier of Chinese folk memory. Horse years are read as active and restless, favoring travel and change over settled routine. The element modifies that base reading: in the five phase (Wu Xing) system Earth governs the center, the color yellow, the turning point between seasons and the virtue of good faith. An Earth year is traditionally read as a stabilizing pause after the more active phases around it; Earth is held to feed Metal and to be held in check by Wood.

Put together, 1978 reads in the folk tradition as a Horse year with a Earth cast, Earth's steadiness tempering the animal's own temperament rather than replacing it. The same twelve animal cycle, adapted with local variation, also orders the traditional calendars of Vietnam, where the rabbit is usually read as a cat, and of Japan, where the pig is usually read as a boar; the underlying stem and element layer that gives 1978 its Earth cast specifically is a Chinese addition that these neighboring traditions do not all keep in the same form. Older reckonings also put the same twelve branches to work outside the calendar of years: the same order once named the twelve double hours of the day and the twelve compass points, so Horse marks a direction and a stretch of the clock in those older systems as well as this year.