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How Chinese Names Entered Western Star Lists

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How Chinese Names Entered Western Star Lists

Names of this kind reached western astrology by an indirect route. Nineteenth-century compilers of star lore, above all Richard Hinckley Allen in Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning (1899), gathered Arabic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic and Chinese designations for the same objects side by side, often at second hand and in inconsistent romanisations. Twentieth-century astrological compilations, Vivian Robson's among them, drew their star lists from such reference works, and the mixed nomenclature came with them; that is why a single astrological star catalogue can hold Arabic descriptive names, Latin translations of Greek positions and Chinese mansion numbers in the same column. No traditional Ptolemaic planetary nature is recorded for this star. Its interest is in the position it marks within the figure of Andromeda and in the reminder that the fixed-star lists are a compilation, layered out of several traditions rather than handed down whole.

What follows for a reader meeting this entry is practical. A designation of this form names a position within a mansion and does not name an object in the way an Arabic star name attempts to; the informative unit is the mansion, not the numbered star inside it. This atlas holds the twenty eight xiu as their own type, so the useful move from here is to the mansion rather than to any planetary nature, and no planetary nature should be supplied for a star that never had one in the tradition the name comes from. Reading a Ptolemaic nature onto a Chinese positional label would be inventing a correspondence between two systems that never made one.

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