The zodiac of horoscopes is Western and the Chinese sign has entered everyday conversation, but other living systems exist — Indian astrology above all, consulted by hundreds of millions of people, and the Maya calendar, still kept in Guatemala — as well as a few “traditions” invented in the 20th century. Each has its page below, with a calculator when there is something to calculate; this page gathers what did not deserve one: the variants of the Chinese sign, the recent inventions, and what is not astrology at all.
Vedic astrology (jyotish)
Sidereal zodiac, Moon sign, 27 nakshatras, dashas: Indian astrology, with the calculator for your Vedic sign.
Maya astrology and the tzolk’in
The 260-day tzolk’in, its twenty signs and thirteen numbers, and the calculator for your Maya sign.
Where astrology comes from: Babylon, Greece and after
Babylonian omens, the birth chart of Alexandria, Baghdad, Kepler, the newspaper horoscope of 1930: four thousand years of history.
What is my Chinese sign?
Animal, element and polarity of your birth year, taking the lunar New Year into account, with trines and oppositions.
Variants of the Chinese sign
The cycle of twelve animals spread across East Asia with differences. In Vietnam the Cat replaces the Rabbit and the Water Buffalo stands in for the Ox. In Japan the calendar has followed the civil year since 1873: the animal changes on 1 January, not at the lunar new year, and the Boar replaces the Pig. Tibetan astrology combines the Chinese animals, the five elements and Indian borrowings in a system of its own, still used to fix wedding dates. Thailand, Korea and Mongolia keep the same animals with calendar nuances. Our Chinese zodiac page follows the Chinese version; if you were born in Vietnam under the Rabbit, you are a Cat.
The invented “traditions”
Several systems presented as ancestral are recent. Celtic tree astrology (thirteen signs by period of the year, each a tree) derives from the calendar imagined by the poet Robert Graves in The White Goddess (1948), with no druidic source. The Egyptian astrology of fortune-telling sites, with its twelve gods, has no equivalent in Egyptian texts, which mostly knew the decans. The Native American medicine wheel with twelve animal totems was popularised by a 1980 book and matches no specific tribal tradition. They can be pleasant games; they are not what they claim to be.
And numerology, tarot?
They are not astrologies — nothing in them depends on the sky — but they answer the same wish to read oneself in a system of symbols. The site treats them separately: name numerology and tarot. As with everything above, the only honest attitude is that of the game: a mirror you look into, not a law you undergo.
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