Origin 433 BCE
The twenty-third mansion lies in Cancer around the Beehive cluster. Associated with the dead, tombs and the spirit world, it is a solemn lodge concerned with ancestors, offerings and hidden matters. The hazy patch at its centre, resolvable into separate stars only with an instrument, was recorded in Chinese sources as a cloudy or vaporous object long before telescopes existed, and whether it could be made out on a given night was used as a rough measure of the clarity of the air. The lodge's associations with the dead may owe something to that dim and indistinct appearance, though no early source states the connection and it should not be assumed.
Facts
Identity
Equatorial Extent (Du)4 du (about 3.9 degrees of equatorial arc) 2Tradition: Han-era Shi Shen tradition (Kaiyuan Zhanjing) Du: the arc-degree unit of the classical Chinese calendar, where a full circle equalled 365 and a quarter du (about 0.9856 modern degrees per du). This width is the Han-era figure standardized under the Taichu calendar and preserved in the Tang-dynasty Kaiyuan Zhanjing's Shi Shen star table; later dynasties recorded small revisions as precession shifted the determinative stars, so this is one epoch's figure, not a timeless constant. It measures the mansion's extent along the celestial equator (right ascension), the coordinate system Chinese astronomy actually used, not a position on the ecliptic (tropical zodiac); the atlas has no sourced mapping from this equatorial system onto a start point in ecliptic longitude, so this figure alone cannot be substituted into a start-end boundary range the way the equal Arabic-mansion spans are. Determinative StarTheta Cancri 2Tradition: Han-era Shi Shen tradition (Kaiyuan Zhanjing) Origins
Origin Period433 BCE 1Tradition: Chinese equatorial astronomy Origin PeriodThe full set of twenty-eight lunar mansions is attested together for the first time on the lacquer box from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, sealed in 433 BCE, the earliest surviving object to record the complete list of names. 1 Origin of the NameThe English "lunar mansion" is borrowed from the Indian nakshatras and the Arabic manazil and misdescribes the xiu. A xiu is a lodge marked by a determinative star and measured in right ascension along the celestial EQUATOR; it is not a division of the Moon's ecliptic path, and the three systems are not variants of one scheme. 2 Attributions
PalaceVermilion Bird of the South 1 Learn More
The Lunar Mansion Gui (Ghost)
Gui (Ghost) is the twenty-third of the twenty-eight xiu, the lunar mansions of traditional Chinese astronomy. Each xiu is a segment of the sky marked by a group of stars near the celestial equator, and together they divide the heavens into the belt through which the sun, moon and planets appear to move.
Palace, animal and place in the sky
This mansion belongs to the Vermilion Bird of the South, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the south, one of the four symbolic creatures among which the twenty-eight are shared out seven to each. In the later scheme that pairs every mansion with a creature, Gui is assigned the Goat.
The twenty-eight mansions are among the oldest elements of Chinese sky-lore, attested well before the common era and used to track the nightly progress of the moon and to fix the calendar. The system is described here as that documented astronomical and calendrical tradition, from which its astrological uses later grew.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Gui (Ghost) in the twenty-eight xiu list.
Contained In
One of the seven lunar lodges of this palace.
Originates in Language
Sources
1. Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven
David W. Pankenier, Cambridge University Press, 2013On the twenty-eight lodges and the Zeng Hou Yi lacquer chest
2. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth
Joseph Needham, Cambridge University Press, 1959Vol. 3, the section on astronomy: the hsiu (lunar mansions), the equatorial system and the du measureQuote, Vol. 3, the section on astronomy: the hsiu (lunar mansions), the equatorial system and the du measure
The twenty-eight lodges are equatorial divisions bounded by determinative stars and so of unequal width, measured in du on a circle of 365.25 parts; their relation to the Indian and Arabic lunar mansion systems is unresolved.
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