Anthropology

by A. L. Kroeber

95. The Zodiac

The foregoing example should not establish the impression that the main source of all culture is to be sought in Egypt. Many other ancient and modern countries have made their contribution. It is to the Chinese, for instance, that we owe silk, porcelain, and gun powder. The ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, on the lower course of the Tigris and Euphrates, moved toward definite cultural progress about as early as the Egyptians, and have perhaps contributed as many elements to the civilization of to-day.

One of these is the zodiac. This is the concept of dividing the path of the sun, moon, and planets around the heavens into twelve equal parts, each named after a constellation. The series runs: ram, bull, twins, crab, lion, virgin, scales, scorpion, archer, goat, water-carrier, fishes. Constellations, indeed, had begun to be named at a very early time, as is clear from the practice being common to all mankind. But the specific arrangement of these twelve constellations as a measure of the movement of the heavenly bodies seems to have made its first appearance among the Chaldæan Babylonians about a thousand years before Christ. From them the Persians, and then the Greeks, learned the zodiac; and with its introduction to the Roman Empire it became part of the fund of knowledge common to the whole of western civilization. It does not appear to have been accepted by the Egyptians until Roman imperial times. Knowledge of the zodiac also spread eastward to India. It seems to have been carried as far as China by Buddhist missionaries, but failed to be seriously adopted in that country until its reintroduction by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century.

The Chinese long before had invented a series of twelve signs which has sometimes been called a zodiac, and gradually transmitted it to the adjacent natives of Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Turkistan, and Tibet. This seems to be of independent origin from the western or Babylonian zodiac. It appears to have been devised to designate the hours, then applied to other periods of time, and finally to the heavens. Its path through the sky is the reverse of the western zodiac; and its signs are specifically different: rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, horse, sheep, monkey, hen, dog, and pig. At most, therefore, it would seem that there might have penetrated to China from the west the idea of dividing time or space into twelve units and assigning to each of these the name of an animal. The working out and utilization of the idea were native Chinese.

Already in ancient times the pictures of the twelve constellations of the western zodiac began to be abbreviated and reduced to symbols. These gradually become more and more conventional, although evidences of their origin are still visible. The sign of the ram, for instance, as we employ it in almanacs, shows the downward curling horns of this animal; that for the ox, his rising horns; for the archer, his arrow, and so on. These cursive symbols, once they became fixed, underwent some travels of their own which carried them to unexpected places. The Negroes of the west coast of Africa make gold finger rings ornamented with the twelve zodiacal symbols in their proper sequence. They seem ignorant of the meaning, in fact do not possess sufficient astronomical knowledge to be able to understand the use of the signs. It also remains uncertain whether they learned the set of symbols from European navigators or from the Arabs that have penetrated the northern half of Africa. Nevertheless it is the true zodiac which they portray, even though only as a decorative pattern.

There has been some assertion that the zodiac was known to the more advanced Middle American Indians between Arizona and Peru, but the claim has also been denied. There does appear to have been at least one series of animal signs used by the Mayas of Yucatan in an astronomical connection. It is not known that this series served the true zodiacal function of noting the positions of the heavenly bodies. Further, the Maya series consists of thirteen instead of twelve symbols, and the figures present only distant resemblances to the Old World zodiac. There is only one that is the same as in the Old World zodiac: the scorpion. The relationship of the Maya and Old World series is therefore unproved, and probably fictitious. The case however possesses theoretical interest in that it illustrates the criteria of the determination of culture relationships.

The Mexican zodiac would unquestionably be interpreted as a derivative from the Asiatic one, even though its symbols departed somewhat from those of the latter, provided that the similar symbols came in the same order. The Asiatic ram might well be replaced by a Mexican deer, the lion by a wildcat, and the virgin by a maize goddess. And if the deer, the wildcat, and the maize goddess came in first, fifth, and sixth place, it would be almost compulsory to look upon them as superficially altered equivalents of the Old World ram, lion, and virgin. It is conceivable enough that similar individual symbols might independently come into use in remote parts of the world. But it is practically impossible that a series of symbols should be put into the same arbitrary sequence independently. As a mere matter of mathematical probability there would be no more than an infinitesimal chance of such a complex coincidence. If therefore the sequential identity of the American series and the Old World zodiac should ever be proved,[14] it would be necessary to believe that this culture element was somehow carried into the Middle American regions from Asia, either across northern America or across the Pacific.

Identity of sequence failing, there might still remain an instance of partial convergence. It is within the range of possibility that the Mayas, who were painstaking astronomers and calculators, and who like ourselves named the stars and constellations after animals, arranged a series of these as a mnemonic or figurative aid in their calendrical reckoning. This, however, would be a case of only incomplete parallelism. The general concept would in that event have been developed independently, its specific working out remaining distinctive.

On accurate analysis of culture phenomena, this sort of result proves to be fairly frequent. When independent developments have occurred, there is a basic or psychological similarity, but concrete details are markedly different. On the other hand if a differentiation from a common source has taken place, so that true historical connection exists, some specific identity of detail almost always remains as evidence. It therefore follows that if only it is possible to get the facts fully enough, there is no theoretical reason why ultimately all cultural phenomena that are still hovering doubtfully between the parallelistic and the diffusionary interpretations should not be positively explainable one way or the other. This of course is not an assertion that such proof has been brought. In fact there are far more traits of civilization whose history remains to be elucidated than have yet been solved. But the attainments already achieved, and an understanding of the principles by which they have been made, encourage hope for an indefinite increase of knowledge regarding the origin and growth of the whole of human culture.