What This Is
A year that brings a concealed harm rather than an open strike. 六害 is the set of six harm-pairs: 子未, the power-family harm; 丑午, the official-ghost harm; 寅巳, the office-arrival harm; 卯辰, the young-old harm; 申亥, the contesting-advancement harm; 酉戌, the envy harm. When the annual branch forms one of these with the day-pillar branch, the year stirs a hidden injury. The day branch is the spouse palace and the seat beneath the self, so the harm lands close to home — but quietly.
三命通会 traces the 六害 to the 六合 and names their character: their injury is hidden, not manifest, and is most often seen among kin and intimates. This is not the visible drama of a clash. It is the slow, entangled kind of harm.
When It Fires
It fires when the annual branch forms a 六害 pairing with the day-pillar branch. As the year cycles, the harming branch comes around on schedule, and the concealed strain surfaces when it does.
What It Changes
It surfaces hidden injury. Because the day branch governs the spouse and the seat of self, a 六害 year tends to stir household discord, strain within the closest relationships, the separation or estrangement of kin, hidden health erosion, and concealed emotional pain. Nothing announces itself the way a clash does; instead a quiet damage works underneath — tension that builds, a wearing-away rather than a breaking.
The harm is entangled and slow, harder to name and harder to resolve than a clean collision precisely because it does not show itself plainly.
How To Read It
Read it by what the harm amplifies and by the chart's protection. Where the harming branch deepens the influence of an unfavorable element, the concealed injury compounds; where 印 or other protection is present, the harm is buffered and stays minor. The classics rank 六害 as less obviously severe than 冲 but more entangled — its inauspiciousness is subtle, lingering, and resistant to quick fixes.
So the reading is not catastrophe but quiet strain, weighed against what the chart can absorb. Light cases bring relational tension and undercurrents; heavier ones, with the harm landing on an exposed point, bring financial loss or injury to kin. Never flat — read the concealment against the chart's resilience, and attend to the hidden register the harm works in.
Where This Shows Up
A period of this kind is felt beneath the surface rather than in open events. The closest relationships carry a quiet strain; the household feels subtly off; kin grow distant in ways hard to trace to a cause; health erodes in concealed, low-grade ways; an emotional ache settles in without an obvious source. The harm is intimate and hidden, working through the spouse palace and the seat of self.
Because it does not announce itself, the stretch asks for attention to the undercurrents — the small frictions and quiet erosions that a 六害 year surfaces among the people closest to the chart. When the chart is protected, these stay minor and pass; when it is exposed, they entangle and linger. The texture is concealment: a year of hidden, slow-resolving strain rather than visible upheaval.