Chinese Horoscope: The Story Behind Zodiac Signs and Astrology Symbols
What’s your Chinese Zodiac Sign? Mine’s rabbit. But when I grew up in the Soviet Union, I was told I was a cat. What’s the confusion about? Where does the Chinese Horoscope derive from? This is what I found.
The Earthly Branches
The concept of the Chinese calendar is based on the idea of 12 Earthly Branches. Wikipedia offers the following explanation:
The Earthly Branches (Chinese: 地支; pinyin: dìzhī; or Chinese: 十二支; pinyin: shíèrzhī; literally “twelve branches”) provide one Chinese system for reckoning time.
It’s a clue. But in order to fully understand it, we need to dig another step further and find out where this “system for reckoning time” has it’s roots.
The system of the Earthly Branches was built from observations of the Jupiter orbit. Chinese Astronomers rounded it to 12 years and accordingly divided it into 12 parts. Each one of these parts was named and assigned an animal. 
In Chinese analogy, the 12 years of the Jupiter cycle identified many things, such as the 12 months of the year, directions, season and even the Chinese hour, that was 120 instead of 60 minutes long.
For example: 午 could stand for 180°, 12 PM (give or take one hour), the 7th month of a year, summer or south. Mandarin learners will recognize the character wǔ 午 and now understand the origin of it’s contemporary meaning: noon.
Even though Chinese has it’s own words for cardinal directions (běi, dōng, nán and xī – 北, 东, 南 and 西) – Chinese sailors preferred using the twelve directions of the Earthly Branches. This may sound familiar to you: Modern-day communication frequently uses o’clock to specify directions.
The Chinese Zodiac
Following the principle of the 12 Earthly branches, each of the 12 years of the Jupiter cycle had a symbolic relationship with an animal, and that’s where the zodiac signs come from. In fact, there are also animal signs assigned by month (inner animals) and hours of the day (secret animals), which is an often-overlooked fact in the west.
The Chinese horoscope has also been adapted by several of China’s neighboring countries, which has led to irregularities:
- Rat (Yang, 1st Trine, Fixed Element Water)
- Ox: Water buffalo in Vietnam (Yin, 2nd Trine, Fixed Element Water)
- Tiger (Yang, 3rd Trine, Fixed Element Wood)
- Rabbit: Cat in Vietnam (Yin, 4th Trine, Fixed Element Wood)
- Dragon (Yang, 1st Trine, Fixed Element Wood)
- Snake (Yin, 2nd Trine, Fixed Element Fire)
- Horse (Yang, 3rd Trine, Fixed Element Fire)
- Goat, or Sheep or Ram (Yin, 4th Trine, Fixed Element Fire)
- Monkey (Yang, 1st Trine, Fixed Element Metal)
- Rooster (Yin, 2nd Trine, Fixed Element Metal)
- Dog (Yang, 3rd Trine, Fixed Element Metal)
- Pig: Wild boar in Japan and Elephant in Northern Thailand (Yin, 4th Trine, Fixed Element Water)
This also explains why some people mistakenly confuse animal symbols.
To find out what your Chinese Zodiac is, you may go to this rather ugly but useful website.
Hopefully this information was helpful to you – Let’s talk about new questions in the comments!
