As is usually the case, the Wikipedia article on the Chinese calendar is comprehensive and built on consensus. It states:
The Chinese calendar, as the name suggests, is a lunisolar calendar created by or commonly used by the Chinese people. While this description is generally accurate, it does not provide a definitive or complete answer. A total of 102 calendars have been officially recorded in classical historical texts. In addition, many more calendars were created privately, with others being built by people who adapted Chinese cultural practices, such as the Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, and many others, over the course of a long history.
A Chinese calendar consists of twelve months, each aligned with the phases of the moon, along with an intercalary month inserted as needed to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons. It also features twenty-four solar terms, which track the position of the sun and are closely related to climate patterns. Among these, the winter solstice is the most significant reference point and must occur in the eleventh month of the year. Each month contains either twenty-nine or thirty days. The sexagenary cycle for each day runs continuously over thousands of years and serves as a determining factor to pinpoint a specific day amidst the many variations in the calendar. In addition, there are many other cycles attached to the calendar that determine the appropriateness of particular days, guiding decisions on what is considered auspicious or inauspicious for different types of activities.
The chapter on "Calendar and Chronology" in Brill's Encyclopedia of China Online (2009) was authored by Ho Peng Yoke (1926-2014), who was the Director of the Needham Research Institute from 1990-2001. The first two paragraphs of Ho's chapter begin as follows:
The traditional Chinese calendar is lunisolar, i. e. it is based on both the movement of the moon and on what seems to be the orbit of the sun around the earth. The incommensurability of the lunar synodical period of 29.530587… days and the equinoctial year's 365.2421… days has always been the cause for numerous difficulties with respect to the establishment of a calendar in China. In order to replace the former calendars which after a time had lost their validity, roughly 100 different types of calendars were devised over a period of about 2000 years, many of which were never officially adopted. According to Joseph Needham, the history of calendar making is the consequence of attempts to "make the incompatible compatible."
The calendrical system used for defining the dates of traditional Chinese festivals such as ‘Chinese New Year’ (The first day of the first lunar month, now called 'Spring Festival’ Chun jie 春節 in the PRC), the mid-autumn festival 中秋 (full moon of the 8th lunar month) and so on is the last of the many versions of the Chinese luni-solar calendar that were adopted by successive imperial governments until the fall of the empire in 1911. It is in fact the system adopted by the Qing dynasty in 1644.
Christopher Cullen’s book Heavenly Numbers: Astronomy and Authority in Early Imperial China (Oxford, 2017) gives a detailed account of the successive systems of mathematical astronomy that were used by Chinese astronomical officials in early imperial times to produce the annual luni-solar calendars that were promulgated by imperial authority. The following explanations are taken from Cullen’s book.
On the morning of Chinese New Year's Eve, WXPN (Penn's excellent radio station) had a nice program about the significance of the festival and some of the events that would be going on to celebrate it — including activities in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
WXPN did its homework, and most of the information they conveyed was correct, but one thing they repeatedly said stunned me. They didn't call "shé nián 蛇年" "year of the snake" in English, which I had always and ever heard it referred to as. Rather, they referred to "shé nián 蛇年" as "Year of the Wood Snake". So I searched for it on the internet and, lo and behold, it turned up quite often as "wood snake".
It's Pulleyblank's formulation (xj- > tʰ ; -jəm > -ɛn), but it also explains why x- is retained in 祆 because of it using the intermediary stage -əɲ (between OC -jəm and EMC -ɛn) as the OC source of the EMC form (where OC x- > EMC x-) rather than -jəm (where OC xj- > EMC tʰ-).
. . . the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides. — Hebreu Primiti
The Consonants of Command
Dear Professor Mair,
In regard to your question, “Is there some sense in which we could think of the 12 aspects/signs/symbols of the alphazodiac as comprising/encompassing the basic sounds of the universe?” I’ve dabbled a bit with some intriguing answers in my papers. For instance, in my very first paper, SPP 196, I placed in the endnotes a very interesting reference from the Gospel of the Egyptians (a Nag Hammadi text) that I feel might bear a relationship to the structure and the underlying “sacred” vowels that comprise the Logos/Word — the breath of God — of the alphazodiac. More specifically,
the “three powers” (the Father, Mother, and Son) give praise to the unnamable Spirit — and the “hidden invisible mystery” that came forth is composed of seven sacred vowels (i.e., the Son “brings forth from the bosom/the seven powers of the great / light of the seven voices, and the word/[is] their completion”), with each of those seven vowels repeated exactly twenty-two times (“iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii[iii]/ ēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēē /oooooooooooooooooooooo/uu[uuu] uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/aaaaaaa[aaaa]aaaaaaaaaaa/ ōōōōōōōōōōōō ōōōōōōōōōō”) (Robinson 1990: 209–210). [SPP 196, pp. 38-39].
Wherein we embark upon an inquisition into the divine proportions of the dodecahedron and its congeners, take a peek at the history of accounting, explore the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, and examine the humanistic physics of Werner Heisenberg*.
[*Heisenberg's father was a professor of medieval and modern Greek studies at the University of Munich in Germany. Heisenberg had more a “humanistic” education, i.e. more Latin and Greek than in natural sciences. One morning the young Werner Heisenberg discovered reading Plato's Timaeus a description of the world with regular polyhedra. Heisenberg could not understand why Plato being so rational started to use speculative ideas. But finally he was fascinated by the idea that it could be possible to describe the Universe mathematically. He could not understand why Plato used the Polyhedra as the basic units in his model, but Heisenberg considered that in order to understand the world it is necessary to understand the Physics of the atoms. (source) He contributed to atomic theory through formulating quantum mechanics in terms of matrices and in discovering the uncertainty principle, which states that a particle's position and momentum cannot both be known exactly. (Britannica | Apr 23, 2024)
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We have had an exciting, joyful journey through dodecahedra land, from the archeological discovery of a new specimen in England, to deep, dense discussions about the meaning and purpose of these mysterious objects, to scampering through and clambering over a playground installation of a related form. In this post, I would like to return to the essential twelveness of the dodecahedra.
A little over a year ago, Frank Jacobs published this admirable survey of a mysterious object that has perplexed and preoccupied us for the past week — The Mysterious Dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire, Big Think, Atlas Obscura (5/12/23):
The first of many of these puzzling objects was unearthed almost three centuries ago, and we still don’t know what they were for.
I warmly recommend that you take a close look at the header images of two objects in The Cleveland Museum of Art: Mirror with a Coiling Dragon, China, Tang Dynasty 618-907 (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1995.367), Drachma – Sasanian, Iran, reign of Hormizd II, 4th century (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1966.738).
The quality of the photographs is extraordinarily fine and detailed. Using the zoom and expand functions, you can see things not clearly visible to the naked eye. Especially noteworthy is the jagged dorsal fin / frill / spine that runs along the back of the dragon on the Tang mirror and is a conspicuous counterpart of many species of dinosaurs.
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