Gui, the Ghost of the Vermilion Bird

Gui, the Ghost, is the twenty-third of the twenty-eight xiu and the second mansion of the southern palace, the Vermilion Bird. Its name means ghost or demon, identified with faint stars in Cancer surrounding the cluster Praesepe, which was seen as a ghostly vapour or a cloud of departed spirits. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Goat. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it marks a portion of the Moon's path. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu divide the sky into four palaces of seven mansions, the Vermilion Bird of the south gathering the mansions the almanac assigns to summer.

Gui's ghostly reading of the faint stars around Praesepe parallels, independently, the Hellenistic fixed-star tradition's own long-standing association of nebulous, cloud-like objects with blindness, mourning and ill fortune, the same cluster read as a ghost-vapour in Chinese astronomy and as an eye-afflicting nebulous mass in the Ptolemaic tradition transmitted to the Vedic and Western fixed-star literatures alike, three quite separate traditions independently unsettled by this one faint, blurred patch of sky.