The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

What would attract more interest would be a different way to cast horoscopes.  Like the Solar Terms...  An Astrologer might get an advantage by advertising his services as "Horoscopes Cast While U Wait by the Arcane Chinese Method"...

There is no great mystery about Chinese horoscopes, and the main challenge in casting them is converting the calendar date to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The VMS zodiac would fail to do this for the simple reason that there are not reliably 30 days between major terms under any definition. The days are named under that system, but You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and should show strong cycles of repeats if it is meant to represent a single year, and have two words per nymph as a matter of course under the linguistic assumptions of the theory. None of these predictions are borne out.

Most importantly, I think, is that Chinese fortune telling usually doesn't make use of the 24 solar terms, but the 12 solar months. There is a straightforward correspondence between the 12 major terms and the solar months, so if there were other lines of evidence to Chinese divination I would relent on this point, however, it would remain true that the divided signs are superfluous to a divinatory explanation. It seems extremely problematic to me that the only element that seems unambiguously Chinese is both hard to reconcile with the rest of the textual evidence and is superfluous to the proposed interpretation. This is a lot of strain to account for 20% of the signs attested in the VMS, especially since the divided signs remain straightforwardly, if speculatively, resolved by noticing that 15° + 15° = 30°, as one would expect if there was no systematic significance to the division.

To that point, it bears repeating that you are hastily discarding the tradition of monomoiria in Europe; after fading in Late Antiquity, it reenters Europe in the 1200s and is still in active transmission in 1480s. (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is another manuscript with similar entries to Astrolabium Planum, dated only to the 15th century. The scan is terrible and from what I can tell there isn't a narrower date, though others, especially German speakers, may be able to get further than I. From what I can make out, and that is a very live qualification, it seems similar to Angelus.) The absence of a direct antecedent to the VMS, especially in the art, remains challenging, but the Chinese Theory does markedly worse on this score, having no manuscript tradition whatsoever at present. If we can imagine that there is some yet-unseen Chinese manuscript tradition, we can surely infer a gap in the attestation of the monomoiria tradition which almost surely must be the case given the bracketing dates between The Lapidario and Astrolabium. It doesn't settle the question definitively, but the repeated assertion that there is no European tradition of 12x30 "things" is simply willful denial of the evidence at this point.

At any rate, the conjecture that this is for horoscopy is a research agenda, one that should readily turn up a direct antecedent in China if that is the standard you are holding competing theories to.