← the temple the twelve branches · China, by the Han dynasty
Twelve earthly branches, which count the years, the months, the days and the double-hours, and the twelve animals that have ridden them since at least the Han: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, pig. Paired with the ten heavenly stems, which carry the five elements, they make the cycle of sixty that names every year, so that this one is the fire horse. The wheel has the rat at the north and goes round with the clock; the hand is the double-hour we are in, and the animal at the centre is the year's, which began at the New Year's new moon as the page reckons it from the ephemeris. Under it are the four pillars of this minute, and a place to put a birth for its own.
from the last 甲子, 1984, to the next; the year we are in is marked
The stems and branches are older than the animals: they are on the Shang oracle bones, naming the days in a cycle of sixty, three thousand years ago, and the branches were the twelve double-hours and the twelve stations of Jupiter round the sky before anyone put a rat on one. The animals are on a bamboo almanac buried in 217 BC, in nearly the order we have, and the folk tale of the race across the river, with the rat riding the ox and jumping off first, is the explanation that came later. The five elements ride the stems in pairs, yang and yin, wood, fire, earth, metal and water, so that each animal comes round in each element once in sixty years, and a year's name is a stem and a branch: 丙午, the yang fire stem and the horse branch, a fire horse, 2026, as 1966 was. Japan, where the sixty-year names were kept more carefully than in China, held that a woman born in a fire horse year would kill her husband, and in 1966 the birth rate fell by a quarter; 2026 is the first test since.
How the page reckons it. The year begins at the New Year, the first day of the first lunar month, which is the second new moon after the winter solstice in most years, and the third in a year with a leap month, which the almanac inserts by a rule about the solar terms; the page finds the new moons and the Sun's stations with the ephemeris the wheel uses and applies the rule, and agrees with the almanac for every year checked between 1930 and 2034. The almanac's own year pillar, for the four pillars of a birth, changes instead at the start of spring, when the Sun reaches fifteen degrees of Aquarius, about the fourth of February; the month pillar changes at each station of the Sun after that; the day pillar counts from a day known to have been 戊午 (the first of January 2000), and the double-hours run from eleven at night, so that the rat's hour belongs to the next day. The hours are the local clock's, which is to say Portland's or yours. Nothing is stored or sent.
The tables are the almanac's and anyone's; the reckoning follows the rules in the Chinese calendar's public descriptions, the new moons and the Sun's stations from Paul Schlyter's low-precision method in the ephemeris, the calendar in one file. The animals are drawn here. One script.