Snake and Monkey Compatibility
“Two people who saw straight through each other, and stayed anyway.”
Snake and Monkey make secret friends in the Chinese zodiac, scoring 87 out of 100. That is the tie between the two signs themselves, before anything else about either person is taken into account.
The Reading · Secret Friends
Snake and Monkey are paired by Liu He, the six harmonies.
Snake and Monkey are the cycle's genuinely two-faced pairing, and both of you knew it early. The recognition is immediate and largely a matter of method: Snake crossed hidden in a hoof, Monkey poled a raft it had cleared the weeds from, and neither of you has ever done anything the direct way. So each of you is looking at somebody who cannot be fooled, which is at once the greatest relief either of you gets and a permanent low-level unease. There is no naivety here to protect and none to exploit, and what you have instead is an alliance between two people who both know exactly what the other is capable of.
This particular pair is the wheel's famous double reading: a harmony that also punishes. The bond is real, and so is the barb inside it.
Neither of you has to pretend to be simpler or more honest than you are, and that is an enormous freedom for both. Monkey's speed and Snake's judgement are a formidable combination, and between you almost nothing gets past the pair of you. Monkey also lightens a Snake, refusing to treat its gravity as sacred, and Snake gives Monkey the one thing it habitually lacks, which is the patience to wait for the right moment rather than the nearest one.
The barb is real and it is in the middle of the bond rather than at the edge of it. Monkey's teasing finds the exact place where Snake is proud, and Snake stores it. Snake's withholding, in turn, gives Monkey a puzzle it cannot resist prodding at. Neither of you ever fully commits to trusting the other, and both of you keep something back as insurance, which the other detects and answers in kind. It is close, and it is never quite safe.
In the controlling cycle fire checks metal, so Snake tends to be the brake on Monkey. Useful in small doses, exhausting as a daily arrangement.
One yang, one yin: one of you moves first and the other reads the room, which is the oldest working arrangement there is.
Snake and Monkey in the Ancient Zodiac
An animal year is half of a reading. Which of the twelve Ancient Zodiac signs each of these two actually carries depends on the season they were born in, and the pairing below is where the reading gets specific.
