Fortune telling in the magazine, is a guilty pleasure to read for some people. Although most people don’t believe in it, it is still very interesting to read just for the fun of it. Who doesn’t feel curious about themselves, what does their own birthdate and personal characteristics tell about them. Other than the more famous western zodiac and the Chinese zodiac, Indonesian, especially the Javanese have their own zodiac, the name is neptu.

Neptu is a number from the combination of your birthdate weekday number and pasaran number. The weekday number is not sequential from 1 to 7, however, and the pasaran number is the weekday number of a pasaran, a week (5 days) in Javanese calendar. If you have known the day of your birthday, you can just calculate your weton in the next paragraph. I you aren’t you can just google “what day was <insert birthdate> or calculate with this formula.

with Gregorian code Gregcode=1 ; month=month+12 and year=year-1 for January and February. You then divide the result with 7 and take the remainder with 0 as Sunday until 6 for Saturday.

In Javanese calendar there are five days in a week: Legi, Pahing, Pon, Wage, and Kliwon. To calculate your pasaran, you first calculate pasaran for the first day of the month using the table pictured below. Then you divide your (birthdate-1) with 5, take the remainder and add them with the number we get from the table. Convert 0 as Legi until Kliwon as 4.

Neptu is previously explained in this article, if you want to read more about it.

How was it? After you done exercising your brain, you get both your birthdate and birth pasaran. There are 35 different combination for them, called weton. You can convert them into number and adding them, resulting to the much awaited neptu. Neptu of weekdays are Sunday(5), Monday(4), Tuesday(3), Wednesday(7), Thursday(8). Friday(6), and Saturday(9). neptu of pasaran are Legi(5), Pahing(9), Pon(7), Wage(4), and Kliwon(8).You can now see your fortune and characteristics based on your neptu., for example, mine is Sunday Pahing, 5+9 becoming 14. Here is a list for them.

How about you, did you calculate your neptu? Are you mostly nodding or shaking your head after you read yours?

Source: Wikipedia (Doomsday algorithm), personal collection (algorithm for calculating weton and neptu), Kompasiana (characteristics of neptu)

Interesting website to check your Javanese birthdate: Sastra