The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Pisces diagram has 29 "things" , right? Not 30?

Pisces has 29 nymphs, 30 labels (29 in the main diagram,  1 in the central medallion), and 31 stars (29 in the main diagram and 2 in the central medallion).  That diagram is the only one that has stars and labels in the central medallion.

I already discussed my theory for why there are 29 nymphs and 31 stars in that diagram. It does not depend on COT vs EOT, or the sign, or the month.  It only assumes that the Author wanted that diagram to have 30 "things", like all the others; but the Scribe drew only 29 "things" by mistake, then mis-counted the stars as 28 and over-corrected by drawing the two in the center, then properly counted the labels as 29 and corrected by adding the label in the center.

February has only 28 days 3/4 of the time, and 29 days 1/4 of the time.  So, even if we assume that the month was meant to be February not Mars, and we disregard the label and two starts in the center,  the count of "things" on that diagram is closer to the equal number (30) seen in all the other diagrams, than to the mean or majority number of days of February in the Western calendar.  

The point is, why does the VMS Zodiac start with Pisces labeled February, when Western Zodiacs usually start with Aries and the Western calendar starts with January?  Afaik the EOT does not have a convincing explanation for that question either.

Pisces diagram is labelled "mars".

Oops! My bad.

So half of my proposed explanation for the anomalous start of the VMS zodiac does not work. 

Half of it still works, though.  If the first diagram is indeed about the first "bigap" of the solar term system (from Lìchūn to Jīngzhé), it would still have spanned the last 14 days of (Western) Aquarius and the first 16 days of Pisces.  Justifying why the Author equated it with Pisces.

The second half of my argument does not quite work -- if the month names are assumed to be original.  That first bigap would have spanned from January 27 to February 25 in the Julian calendar. So that would not be consistent with the "Mars" label.

However, Pisces would have been from about February 10 to March 11.  That is 19 days of February and 11 of March.  

So, the label "Mars" there is not totally incorrect: if the Author first decided that the diagram was about Pisces, and then intended to pick the month that best matched the sign , he was off by only 5 days.  But, importantly, the label "Mars" it is equally inconsistent with the sign independently of the reason why that diagram is attributed to Pisces.    It is equally "semi-incorrect" under both the COT and the EOT.

However, "Mars" as the month name for Pisces would be correct if the month names were written after 1582; since, after the Gregorian reform, Pisces spanned from about February 18 to about March 19.  That is, 19 days of March and only 11 or so of February.  But that would definitely have  been independent of why the diagram was labeled Pisces, and would have no relevance for the COT vs EOT question.

So, in summary, that is my explanation for that anomaly: the first diagram is about the interval of the year from Lìchūn to Jīngzhé (~30.437 days), and the Author assigned it to Pisces because it was the sign that best matched that interval of the year (with ~16 days of overlap, against ~14 for Aquarius).  Then somebody else, after 1582, wrote the name "Mars" because it best matched the sign (with ~19 days of overlap).

All the best, --stolfi