ext_11697 ([identity profile] wombat1138.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] wombat1138 2006-03-01 05:59 pm (UTC)

Oddly, that reminds me of my mother and her sisters. My mother and her youngest sister were both born in the year of the Tiger, which is thought to make its girlbabies aggressive and nearly unmarriageable. They're the only two girls in the family who got married.

I've muttered for a long time that while I can see how personalities might be partially shaped by the general time of year one was born in (and thus one's prenatal conditions and formative encounters with the world; vindication by this study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11408788&dopt=Abstract), as it turns out), the Western zodiac would end up getting completely flipped in that regard for the Southern Hemisphere, negating any pretense to usefulness in that regard. I keep looking up and promptly forgetting what sort of natural basis there might be for the Eastern Zodiac, whose critters don't map to constellations-- the (apparent) orbit of Jupiter? what about the sixty-year macrocycle when the elements are factored in? The only other use of the critterset that I know of is a timetelling cycle of twelve ((sometimes very) approximately) two-hour units throughout the day; there's a really excellent description here (http://www.sengokudaimyo.com/miscellany/miscellany.html), which I've probably linked before :b Other pertinent factoids/keywords which I half-remember are that Chinese astronomy was oriented[*] toward the south instead of the east, as well as something to do with the horizon that's different from the following asterisquerie.

*: Aside from the obvious (but irrelevant) intercultural chaff flung up by the term "oriented" in this context, it's still a culturally loaded word for completely different reasons; Western cosmology pointed east, toward sunrise (oriens, "rising"), for a very long time. East was "up" on European maps throughout the Middle Ages, which this page (http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/map/h_map/h_map.htm) ascribes to the religious influence of the Crusades although that doesn't explain why the Western zodiac was originally based on heliacal astronomy, the observation of what constellation the sun was rising "into" at the horizon. However, it's definitely interesting that medieval Arabic maps are south-oriented again, which may have something to do with a global split between temperate/tropical astronomy-- once you drop to a certain range around the equator, you lose interest in the circumpolar region because you just can't see it very well anymore, though then I'm not quite sure how you keep track of where south is....

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