The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Again:

Puzzle 1: Why are Aries and Taurus split into two halves?

The closest you get is the half signs, but you can only justify reading them as half signs by assuming a definition of the solar term that is 200 years too late and thoroughly Westernized.

Again, the division of the year into 24 solar terms is very old. At least 1000 years before the VMS was created.  AFAIK it has no parallel in Western astrology or astronomy.

But your argument that [the half-diagrams of Ares and Taurus] add up to a whole is predicated on the 30-point division. Western, not Chinese, astronomy explains this.

The conclusion that those four pages are halves of two wholes is obvious from the fact that there are two of them with the Aries icon and two with the Taurus icon, and from the fact that each of those four has half as many "things" as each of the others.  It does not depend on the exact numbers, and does not involve Babylonian degrees or any other "Western" concept.

Puzzle 2: Why do all diagrams contain the same number of things?

"All the full diagrams have exactly same number of "things" (30)." This is the straightforward prediction of the assumption that the Western degree counts add to the size of the Western signs they count.

Sorry, I don't understand this remark.

Prior to 1645, solar months were irregular counts of days.

That is not at all what I understand.  The solar terms were, since the beginning, a division of the tropical year into 24 equal parts.  It meant that each term was a fractional number of days, specifically 365.25../24 days.

What changed in 1600s was that the solar terms were redefined as a division of the Ecliptic into 24 equal arcs.  This shifted the endpoints of the arcs a little, because the speed of the Earth in its orbit is slightly variable along the year.  Neither definition depended on what units the Chinese astronomers or geometers used to measure angles or star positions.

The puzzle here is why the VMS diagrams have the same number of "things".  The precise number does not matter here; that is a separate puzzle,see below.  If it was a Western Zodiac, one would expect the "things" in each diagram to be days; but then some signs should have 30 "things", some 31 "things".   

If it is a Western zodiac but the things are not days, they must be (Western) degrees of angle.  I understand that Western astronomers were familiar with the idea of dividing the Ecliptic into 12 equal arcs.  But is there any example of a Western Zodiac where each sign is depicted as a separate circular diagram covering an equal arc of the ecliptic, with each degree illustrated and named individually?

Again, the question here is not the number, but the unformity.  The COT partly explains it because solar terms are divisions of the year into 24 equal parts.  The EOT does not seem to have an explanation.  AFAIK, on every Western Zodiac that depicts each sign as a separate circular diagram divided into "things", those "things" are days, and thus the number of "things" varies from sign to sign.  That is, the signs are depicted as not equal.  Do you have any counterexamples?

Puzzle 3. Why does each diagram have 15 or 30 divisions, not 10 or 12 or 30 etc?

You believe there are readable (Western) degrees on that diagram. I see you trying to move off this, but that was the thing that informed your reading, and it still animates how the parts fit together.

Each diagram obviously represents some interval of the year or some arc of the Ecliptic.  Then each of the 15 or 30 labels/stars/nymphs in a diagram obviously represents one part of a division of that interval/arc into 15 or  30 parts.  Thus each label/star/nymph represents one part of a division of the year or of the Ecliptic into 360 (not 365.25) parts.  It does not represent one day.  

This conclusion is not a claim of the COT. It does not depend on any Origin theory, or any assumptions about unit of angle or whatever, or what precisely those diagrams represent.  It follows simply by counting the labels (and assuming that the missing diagrams have the same number of "things" as the ones that survived.)

Moreover, if each diagram covered a variable span of time or a variable arc on the Ecliptic, then each label/star/nymph would represent a different amount of time or a different angle in each diagram. That seems highly unlikely.

After I conjectured that each half-diagram of Aries and Taurus depicted a Chinese solar term (more precisely, since solar terms are points, it was an unavoidable conclusion that each  label/star/nymph represented 1/15 of that interval. Thus one Western degree.  Note that this was a conclusion, not an assumption.

You say that this interpretation is impossible because, before the 1600s, the unit of angle used by Chinese astronomers to specify star positions and planet motions was not 1/360 of a circle but 1/365.25 of a circle.  But that is not relevant.  While by 1400 the Chinese solar terms had acquired some astrological roles, they were not used by astronomers. They were only a conceptual tool used to keep the main lunisolar calendar synchronized with the seasons.  Thus a division of each solar term into 15 parts would not be incompatible with Chinese astronomy at the time.

I admit that I don't know of any other Chinese depiction of the solar terms where each term is depicted as one circular diagram divided into 15 "things".  But I have not looked at any Chinese book about astronomy or astrology, much less one that discusses solar terms.  So on Puzzle 3 I admit that the COT and EOT are tied 0x0.

Puzzle 4: Why does the VMS Zodiac start with Pisces?

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But that example starts the Zodiac with Capricorn, not Pisces; and assigns Pisces to March, not February.
This Puzzle can be split in two parts: 

Puzzle4a: Why doesn't the VMS Zodiac begin with Aries or January, like the Western ones?

The COT's explanation is that those diagrams do not represent the Western signs but the Chinese solar terms.  
More precisely, since the solar terms are points rather than intervals, each half-diagram represents the interval between two successive solar terms (call that a "term gap"), and each full diagram represents two of those intervals (a "term bigap").
Thus, in particular, f70v2 was not meant to depict the first sign of the Western Zodiac or the first month of the Western calendar, but most probably the bigap between the first solar term (Lìchūn) and the third one (Jīngzhé).

Puzzle4b: Why does it start with Pisces and February, specifically?

Lìchūn now falls approximately on February 4, and Jīngzhé falls on March 6.  In the Julian calendar, those would be January 27 and February 25.  So, the first bigap of the solar term cycle would have spanned 5 days of January and 25 of February,

In the Julian calendar, Pisces would be from about February 10 to March 11.  So that first bigap would have spanned the last 14 days of Aquarius and the first 16 days of Pisces. 

And Pisces would have spanned 19 days of February and 11 days of March. And February would have spanned 19 days of Pisces and 9 days of Aquarius.

So, if the Author tried to give the approximate correspondence of those Chinese solar term gaps and bigaps to the Western Zodiac and Western calendar, the best approximations for the first diagram would indeed have been Pisces and February.  That would be the result no matter how he would have matched the time intervals (bigap->sign and bigap->month, or bigap->sign and sign->month, or bigap->month and month->sign).

And once he picked the month and sign for the first diagram, the others would have followed in the Western sequence.  Including the four half-diagrams.

All the best, --stolfi