The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Is there an attested Chinese tradition of representing the 24 solar terms with abstract circular diagrams?

I could not find any depiction of each solar term as a circular diagram with 15 labeled slices.  But I did only a very superficial search.  I owe you that one. What comes up all the time is single circular diagram with the 24 solar stations.

By the way, how common are depictions of the Western Zodiac where each sign is depicted as a separate diagram with 30 individually labeled slices?

Does that tradition link them to the somewhat uncommon 12 zodiac sign divisions of the ecliptic?

Again, those 24 solar terms were apparently grouped or spanned by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. associated with 12 animals (Tiger, Rabbit, etc).  IIUC, they are about 15 days displaced from the Western Zodiac divisions. These labels are not specific to that use; they were used since antiquity to number things in any set of 12 things.  They are the same labels used in China to label the years in a 12-year cycle.  

Would the Ming literati have considered this tradition among their most important, in line with the way you present the VMS scribe asking for the most important books?

I didn't check the dates, but those 24 solar terms seem to be still very important, with festivals and customs attached to specific points.  (For example,立春=lìchūn is the first point on that 360-degree cycle. For astronomical reasons I didn't understand, sometimes a year of the lunar calendar falls entirely between two consecutive lìchūn solar points, so that there is no lìchūn in that year; and it is considered unlucky to marry in such a year.)

there is not much here besides just-so conjecture to carry it either.

Well, I think that there is a lot more evidence than there if for the "Contents is European" theory.

You can assign the zodiac animals this way; rabbit, dragon, snake, and so on. This gives a superficial resemblance to the Babylonian zodiac, but both the derivation and practice are quite different.

But, apart from the decoration, there is hardly any similarity between the VMS Zodiac and Western (Babilonian) Zodiac, is there?  We have what was presumably 12 diagrams with 30 labeled "things" each (not 28/29/30/31), but two of those at the beginning are split into four diagrams of 15 "things".  Why is that more similar to the Western Zodiac than to the Chinese solar terms?

I know what you're going to have me do. I'm going to be asked to imagine a fictional story where this superficial resemblance is seized on by a Voynich artist. But none of that is in evidence!

Indeed, that is a superficial resemblance.  Even if the VMS Zodiac section was about Western astrology, with one page for each "sign", the diagram on page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. would have nothing to do with scorpions, dragons, or whatever that thing in the center is.  It would be three lines of text about a certain interval of the year, and a list of 30 words, presumably associated to the days in that interval.  That would be its contents.  The drawing at the center is just decoration.  We presume that the interval in question is ~10-24 to ~11-22 because we deduce that the drawings should have been a scorpion, based on the drawings of adjacent pages; and the Western Scorpio sign is that interval.  But what evidence is there that the intervals covered by each diagram matches the Western Zodiac divisions?

(By the way, the Western Scorpio sign seems to be astride the Dog and Pig branches of the Chinese 12-branch solar calendar.  Could that "scorpion" drawing be actually a dog? Or a dog-pig hybrid?  Both were eaten in China, it seems, so it would make sense to develop such hybrids.   Hmmm...  Another budding theory there?  )

It is inherently problematic for the Chinese Theory that it requires a just-so story to explain away the mismatch here, first because it's pure speculation and then again because it's a plain admission that inconvenient parts of the manuscript must be speculated away. The actual premise of your argument here is that the manuscript is, at least in part, not copied from Chinese sources.

I don't get what you mean by "just-so story".  Would that include the secret community of daiin worshippers who needed to communicate their heresies in a devilishly complex code, and filled the VMS with bogus drawings to throw the inquisitors off their track?  Or the Swiss doctor who made it a point of deforming every detail of every plant on his herbal, even the very common ones, to protect his secret formulas?

How do the European Origin theories handle those discrepancies -- the unidentifiable and absurd plants, the fixed 30 days per sign of the Zodiac, the incomprehensible cosmic diagrams, ...?

But yes, the COT says that all the "European" decorative elements, and most of the Herbal drawings, are made up by the European scribe or cribbed from other European books.  This claim would explain many otherwise baffling things.  What evidence is there that it is false?

All the best, --stolfi