Crimson and Clover: The Fire Horse Year of 2026
Crimson and Clover* The Fire Horse Year of 2026
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” William Shakespeare. Hamlet.
Everybody knows that the Chinese New Year falls on the 4th February. Except the Chinese who insist on celebrating at the Lunar Festival anytime between January 21st and February 22nd. There are Masters who consider it’s more complicated even than that.
Today as I write mid-January, is somewhere in the middle of this rebirth, the sluggish days of the Ox Month when traditionally everybody is still shaking off the slumber of winter. It’s a commonplace that it’s hard to get much done before February.
Except this year it isn’t like that. The extreme Fire of this Fire Horse year is magnified by the 9 Star that rules the month, setting everything aflame metaphorically as well as physically.. Whether we’re talking about our immediate locality, the UK government, Venezuela, Greenland or Ukraine, the world has hit the ground running. And this will be true one way or another in our offices, our kitchens and our bedrooms. Everything, to coin a phrase, is happening everywhere all at once.
The qualities of Fire include warmth and light of course but also celebrity, promotion, daring, haste, passion, the seeking of attention and a million other tendencies that can be drawn by implication. Horses tend not to look before they leap for instance but they tend to be bold and courageous. These qualities are neither positive nor negative, they are simply what we have to deal with in a year replete with them.
The world has changed and each of us is changing with it, whether we assess that in terms of home and family, politics, history and geography, our kua numbers or our Four Pillars.
The consecutive Fire Horse and Fire Sheep years (known as the Crimson Horse and Blood Goat) have an unfortunate reputation among Chinese Masters. Whether we go back to the baleful prophecies of Masters such as Yang Yum Song (834-906) in the 10th Century or to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution during the last Fire Horse of 1966, they have a bit of a point.
* referencing of course the hit record by Tommy James and the Shondells, which frustratingly peaked in 1968. Never a hit in the UK btw.
Knowing this I did a bit of research into British history which largely bears this foreboding out and I can tell you that of – depending how you count them – forty one and forty four English monarchs since the pivotal Fire Horse of 1066, between eight and eleven have died in Fire Horse and Fire Sheep years. Statistically this is way beyond random. There are no losers without winners of course and the Great Fire of London of 1666 (one of the two predictions that Nostradamus got right) and England winning the soccer World Cup in 1966 may make just that point.
We all know that the only constant is change. Whether we are discussing trees fruiting or shedding in ways that are unique to this year or you and me trying to live some kind of useful life, everything is subject to such change. This is universal; how we react is individual.
So we have broadly two things to consider: one is how we each of us individually are made up, the other is what is changing around us as the new year kicks in. The first we might call dna and family patterns perhaps, the second our environment.
As practitioners of Chinese Metaphysics we have a particular take: we consider our personal kuas and Pillars and we consider the Elemental change brought by the Fire Horse. We are all confronting broadly the same conditions but we all respond differently.
As you know each of us has Four Pillars in our ba zi chart, one for the Hour, Day and Month we were born into as well as one for the Year. This unique formula, a snapshot of the prevailing Elements at the moment of our birth, is a way of describing who we are and how we respond to a universe over which we have little conscious control.
Equally every year has a particular nature expressed as its corresponding Zodiac Animal. There are other factors of course, history as they say may not repeat but it tends to rhyme. Previous Fire Horse Years include 1846 when the USA was in the process of expanding its Southern border by force and China was in the throes of successive trade wars with the West. Which may ring bells.
What then is there for us to do?
In ba zi (that is Four Pillars) practice, there is a form known as Follow the Fire. This describes a ba zi that has so much Fire that it is overwhelmed. Standard advice is to accept that and treat the imbalance as a virtue. This Fire Horse year presents pretty much that choice. Since the Animals fall broadly into two categories, those which are most at ease with Fire and those that are most at ease with Water, the choice is to respond passively or to respond proactively but respond we must. Put simply such an extreme year demands we step up. One way or another. Opportunity is pretty much a Fire thing.
The detail of all an individual’s Four Pillars is crucial to how each responds but into the first category fall the Horse, Sheep, Tiger, Snake, Rabbit and Dog and into the second the Rat, Ox, Dragon, Monkey, Pig and Rooster.
The circumstances we have in common. For all of us the tai sui, the most powerful repelling force of the year is pushing from the South; the unhelpful Wu Huang or Five Yellow Star is there too. So we don’t choose to face or locate South lightly. Meanwhile the annual spoiler or san sha, sits North making most North locations inhospitable. The more helpful spots are East, South East and West. This is the situation we have to deal with.
A glut of Fire amounts to haste, hurry, passion, fame, promotion, anger, opportunity and a thousand other related qualities. These challenges face us all, the choice is whether to rise to that, accept the attention and flurry or to batten down the hatches and be ready to fight fires real or figurative. As I say, for the first group of Animals the first of these may work best. It’ll take determination but just as a skilled yachtsman can sail West against a contrary wind, so as Nietszche wrote, that which does not kill me makes me stronger.
The second group may find lying low more practical. This as I say depends upon the individual Pillars in their ba zi.
And finally we have access to the Tao, the Way, the process. The Tao is not necessarily the open door, nor necessarily not the closed one and “The Tao”, as Lao Tze wrote, “that can be spoken is not the Tao”. But we can feel it. We know what is appropriate. We consider the weather, time and space, we consider the qi of the year, we consider the tendencies of our Zodiac Animals but finally if we’re smart we observe the Middle Path.
Richard Ashworth 2026©
To hire me to draw up a full interpretation of your ba zi, that is (all) Four Pillars, email me at richardashworthfengshui@gmail.com. If you want to learn more about ba zi, my book I Talk to the Animals is out now. There’s a sample chapter or so on this link.
Richard Ashworth©
www.imperialfengshui.info © 2026
art by @elliespinelli ©
| Richard Ashworth is one of the most respected Western Feng Shui Masters. A good taster of his approach may be found on Audible . You can also see him at work on tv’s Housebusters Most Thursdays and Fridays he is to be found teaching both feng shui and ba zi one-to-one online (times by mutual arrangement) with students from Seattle to Belgium. Richard has worked from Lebanon to Bermuda, in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and with stars such as Naomie Harris, Kelly Hoppen and Gillian Anderson. Unusually for a Western Master, he has addressed the Grand Masters at the International Feng Shui Conference in Singapore. Every month we send (at a modest fee) retainer clients a more comprehensive monthly bulletin than this one, covering in detail right places to be (and when) as well as the most helpful days Animal by Animal and much more from the Chinese calendar. Richard Ashworth© |