via the annual New Year festivities that have become a tourist attraction in the Chinatowns of Western cities. They entered the popular literature of the West after 1979, following the publication of Theodora Lau’s The Handbook of Chinese Horoscopes, which self-consciously adapted the personal style of the existing Western sun-sign guides, offering guidance on work, home life, and marriage to those people caught up in the wider reaches of New Age culture, in a clear example of the triumph of religious globalization.56 Not dissimilar to the tzhu, although not, so far, exported to the West, are the twenty-four fortnightly periods, each of which has a meteorological or seasonal character and can serve as a mnemonic for the farming year. The first of these, chhi, Li Chuun, or Beginning of Spring, runs from 5 to 19 February, and the last, Ta Han, or Greater Cold, begins on 21 January and concludes as Li Chuun begins.57 Another system took the five phases, wood, fire, metal, earth and water, each of which has a yin day and a yang day, and produced ten variations which then provided a guide for auspicious actions— action on a yang-fire day, for example, passivity on a yin-water day, and all shades in between on the other days. The third framework was provided by the personal horoscope, divided fundamentally into twelve sections and containing meanings that contain traces of its Indian and Persian origins; both the sixth “sphere of influence” and the Indian sixth “house,” for example, represent servants and service.58 The horoscope’s value was located in its mathematical structure, which provided a map for the individual life that could then be matched against the ebb and flow of cosmic law. While the structure of a Chinese horoscope was identifiably the same as, or similar to, that of India and the Islamic world, the language indicates the use of Chinese assumptions. In one example, dated to 1325 c e , the location of the Wood planet (Jupiter) in the Basket (the 7th hsiu) offered a warning to beware of Saturnine men, while Chi Tu, the moon’s south node and “Evil Aura of Saturn,” can be interchanged with the comet, the “Evil Aura of Mercury,” an exchange of location that, in Indian astrology, would probably defuse the danger emanating from both.59 Horoscopic astrology is currently undergoing a revival in Taiwan and is spreading to Hong Kong, its appeal perhaps reinforced by its general similarity to the Western system now familiar from popular horoscope columns in newspapers. Chinese cosmology depended on a concept of unity and interdependence of all things, tangible and intangible, existing within a matrix of meaning, purpose, pattern, and order. It survived the suppression of communism thanks to the size and vigor of the communities of “overseas” Chinese. Notions of kinship and the veneration of ancestors (the interdependence of 108
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