Supervised by Ms.M
Affiliation: KARASU CHANNEL
Traditions studied: 12+ (Western astrology, Four Pillars of Destiny, Nine Star Ki, tarot, runes, palmistry & physiognomy, name numerology, numerology, feng shui, Vedic astrology / Zi Wei, Onmyodo, spiritual reading, and more)
Personal readings: by request via Contact,
currently booked years out
Read about Personal Year Number
About this reading: Your Personal Year Number, numerology's equivalent of "this year's fortune," is calculated by combining your birth month and day with the current year. Where your Life Path Number stays fixed for life, your Personal Year Number changes every year and is said to trace out a nine-year cycle. It's a number for reading where you currently stand within that ongoing flow.
Personal Year Numbers get used as "this year's fortune" because of the idea that within the nine-year cycle, different years call for different actions — a year for planting seeds, one for growth, one for harvest, one for letting go. The same person might get read as "a year to move" in one year and "a year to wait" the next, which is the big difference from the Life Path Number that never changes. As we see it here, the Personal Year Number works best as a loose timing guide for how to use the year ahead, not a fixed verdict.
Lore column: Why Did Unlucky Years Come Around Every Twelve Years?
A short read on the legends and strange tales around this reading, with this site's own view.
In Japan, the idea of reading the flow of luck through numbers that come around year by year has long taken the form of yakudoshi, or unlucky years. The ages best known today are around 25, 42 and 61 for men and 19, 33 and 37 for women. But the Iroha Jiruisho, a dictionary from the late Heian period, is said to list 13, 25, 37, 49, 61, 73, 85 and 97 as the unlucky ages.
Look closely at that older sequence and every age is twelve years apart. Each falls in a year when the zodiac animal of one's birth year comes back around, and a leading theory holds that yakudoshi grew out of the calendar thinking of Onmyodo. The puns are well known too: 42 can be read as "shi-ni," to die, and 33 as "sanzan," dreadful. Some researchers dismiss these as folk explanations added later, while others suggest they may have been widely known from early on, and the question remains open.
The fact that the unlucky ages themselves have shifted over the centuries shows there was never one settled answer. What people seem to have sensed is that something might happen at the turning point when the calendar completes its circle and returns them to the same place as the year they were born.
As we see it here, yakudoshi is dread of things that come around again, given a shape. This is our own conjecture, but people may have been wary of the year their birth animal returned because it felt like a year in which the fate they were born with would be tested once more. Checking a number that cycles every nine years seems to spring from the same unease and the same prayer: the wish to know where you stand within a cycle you cannot see.
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