The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

Here's the thing about this:

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.

As a logical position, an exercise in pure rhetoric, I agree with this. If you evacuate the content of the "things", but keep that assumption that they must equal, and assume they measure the rounds in question, and that the rounds are Zodiac signs, yes, 15=15, they must be halves of Zodiac signs. QED. That comports with my usual concession to the observation there is an intriguing parallel between the half-signs and solar terms, so I'm not sure it gets you very much I'm not willing to hand over without this exercise. My point was that eventually you do have to deal with the fact that the rounds are not counted with "things", but by some unit that means something. And I'm sorry, they look like Western degrees.

And I know that until very recently you were very firm that that content looked like degrees:

And also check You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The division of the Ecliptic into 24 sectors of 15 degrees (not days) was a common concept (not just knowledge of a few astronomers) from before 400 CE at least.

Even if that is correct for Chinese astronomy in general (and one must be wary of possible of undue generalizations by scholars), the "solar terms" were definitely a division of the Ecliptic (or of the year) into 360 parts, not 365; and those parts pointedly were definitely not days, because the users of that system understood that the number of days between two successive "terms" was variable.

But the point is not that Chinese Astrologers divided the year into 12 parts. Both the Chinese and the Europeans did so.  The point is the the Chinese were used to dividing the year into 360 degrees (not just 365 days) and to group those degrees into 24 sets of exactly 15 each, or (perhaps less commonly) into 12 sets of exactly 30 each.

When I say the VMS looks like it is counted in degrees, I am confident that you see what I'm talking because you hammered home how Chinese that was. You argued that solar terms were denominated in degrees. You argued that the thing that was equal between the Zodiac rounds was degrees. You repeatedly argued it had to be degrees rather than days. I know it permeated every aspect of your reading of the Zodiac section because you told me and kept coming back to it. I have some basic epistemological reservations about the certainty with which you see the degree interpretation, but by and large I think your sense that those were degrees in the VMS was on track. When I expressed those reservations, you pretty soundly rejected them:

And [the Pisces diagram] has 31 [stars]. Both surely were mistakes by the Scribe (like in other pages where he omitted a couple of stars).  And the Author did not mind, because both nymphs and stars were just decoration.  The meaningful information contents of each Zodiac page was only the text, the approximate position of those 30 (or 15) degrees in the Western calendar and/or Western Zodiac, and the ordered list of 30 labels.  Now, guess how many labels there are in the Pisces diagram?

Pretty recently when I said this wasn't so cut and dried, you wanted to double down on how you knew degrees were the important information here. I'm the guy who thought you should stop welding that escape hatch shut!

Most of the points in your last post have this fruit from the poisonous tree. There are some other things we could talk about---how Chinese astrology doesn't take observations, that you have already been directed to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and how you've adjusted your read of the Calendar to fit the Chinese theory (not the other way around). But I think the most important thing is that the 360-point division cannot be dissociated from how you are constructing the solar terms, and from what I can see, 15 of them don't make a solar term until 1645. They certainly didn't define arcs nor were they defined by stars crossing 360 (evenly spaced? unevenly spaced?) meridians. They were not defined by astrologers, as a matter of religion and law. Without a coherent, Chinese picture of what a solar term is and how it came to be divided into 15, all arguments based on those divisions are sitting on a bad foundation.