The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

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.

You hopefully begin to see my problem! I'm not objecting to the idea of locating this textual tradition outside of Europe; I'm objecting to the fact it's not been found, and pointing to indicators that it might not be there.

Moreover, under the stricter thought experiment you give, this arrangement does not appear in any of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that a Ming informant would have chosen if asked for "most important". (I'm willing to grant the informant may have been heterodox in this regard, but I think this kind of supposition goes to the bigger point I'm getting at.)

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?

If this is a problem for a European origin, it is certainly a problem for a Chinese one!

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.

But without a description of how it is being used here---and I understand the difficulties of this without a translation, it is a fundamental problem with all theories to date---there is nothing concrete here beyond linking two sets of 12. If the artist did know about the Chinese zodiac and chose to link it to the earthly branches through the European one, that is an odd choice that needs more evidence. If they did not know what the text said, then any link is an incredible coincidence.

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.)

The reason this can happen is precisely because the solar terms are secondary in this system. The year is fundamentally a lunar phenomenon, lasting 12 or 13 months, defined as the time between new moons. The way this is reconciled with solar accounting is by fixing the winter solstice in the 11th month, and more accurately the start of Dongzhi, to after the 11th new moon. If you count backwards to the first month, you get the New Year. Because a year can be as short as 354 days and because the new moon wanders against the solar terms, it's possible for a year to completely miss Lichun. So while the solar terms are important, there are only two days they are directly important for; the start of Dongzhi and the start of Lichun.

And no, Lichun is not the first point in a 360-degree cycle. It is the first point in a 24-degree cycle. (Note, however, in the zodiac interpretation you're relying on, the cycle begins with dàxuě because rat is first.) Chinese astronomy did not make use of 360 degrees until they adopted European practice. It's possible we're looking at a European overlay with those 30 stars per page, but there is nothing about that which demands a Chinese reading.

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?

The manuscript is extremely difficult to definitively place, but again, that is no less true for China.

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?

Central to my point is that when you start undermining the evidence like this, it hurts the Chinese theory as well. Perhaps what we see cannot be relied upon to form a theory. But if it is mere decoration, then there is little reason to have this discussion about the Chinese zodiac.

(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?  )

I was a disappointed to see this joke, to be honest.

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". 

A just-so story is a fictional story to explain how something ended up exactly the way it did. Aside from assuming a monosyllabic language to explain the entropy data, I don't think anything about your dictator or scribe or Chinese texts (or "Chinese" texts) is at all real. An intriguing thought experiment, but for now only that.

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, ...?

Flipping the burden of proof would be a problem for my point here if I were advocating with certainty that the VMS represented an underlying European text. I am not, so this is not relevant to my point.