Contents
The breadcrumb bar on every page of this site carries a celestial row: an astrolabe clock, the lunar day, and a strip of chips reading today's sign in seven different systems at once. Hovering a chip gives you a sentence. This section gives you the rest — one page per system, one page per sign, ninety-three signs in all.
They do not agree with each other, and that is the point. Some divide the sky, some divide the year, and one divides nothing at all but counts days in a loop that never touches the sun. Two of the seven are living religion. Two are genuinely ancient and secular in origin. Two were invented in the twentieth century by named authors who can be looked up. One is ancient practice wearing a modern costume. Each page says which it is, in the first paragraph, before anything else.
The seven systems
| System | Divides | Signs | Age | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Western Zodiac | The ecliptic, 12 × 30° from the spring equinox | 12 | Babylonian, 1st millennium BCE | Historical; secular in modern use |
| Chinese Zodiac | Years, on the Earthly Branches | 12 animals × 5 elements | Han-era, on Shang-era stems and branches | Historical; folk custom, Daoist and Buddhist overlays |
| Vedic Rashis | The ecliptic, fixed to the stars | 12 rashis, 27 nakshatras | Vedanga tradition, Hellenistic contact | Living religion — a limb of the Veda |
| Celtic Tree Calendar | Thirteen lunar months | 13 trees | 1948 | Modern construction on medieval ogham |
| Medicine Wheel Totems | The seasonal wheel | 12 totems | 1980 | One author's syncretic system; contested |
| Egyptian Zodiac | Spans of days under a god | 12 deities | Modern popular astrology | Modern; the real Egyptian sky had 36 decans |
| Maya Tzolk'in | Nothing — 13 × 20 days, a pure count | 20 day signs | Attested from c. 600 BCE | Living religion — kept unbroken in highland Guatemala |
What each page carries
Every sign page is built the same way, so the systems can be read against each other:
- What it is — the sign, its glyph, its span, and where the placement comes from.
- Religion — the actual religious material where there is any: the deities, the cult centres, the rites, the texts. Where a system is not religious, the history stands in its place.
- Key dates — a dated table of the events that made the system: first attestation, the text that fixed it, the reform that moved it, the author who invented it. This is the part most zodiac writing leaves out, and it is the part that lets you tell the traditions apart.
- In the year — where the sign sits against the real solar, lunar or seasonal calendar it claims to follow.
The rule these pages follow
Where a tradition is old, the pages say how we know. Where a tradition is recent, the pages name the book and the year. Where scholarship is unsettled — the date of the Vedanga Jyotisha, the Yavanajataka's chronology, the Egyptian civil calendar's introduction, the Long Count correlation — the pages give the range and say it is disputed rather than picking a number and sounding certain.
Nothing here is a claim about prediction. These are cultural and religious artefacts, described as such. Two of the seven systems are held sacred by people alive today, and the pages on those two are written the way you would write about a church.
How the site reads today's signs
The chips in the breadcrumb bar are computed client-side, with no ephemeris and no network. Sun signs use fixed month-and-day boundaries rather than live ingress times, so a sign can be a day off at the cusp. The Chinese year turns at Lunar New Year from a lookup table of boundary dates. The moon phase runs from the mean synodic month counted since the new moon of 6 January 2000. The Tzolk'in day uses the Goodman–Martínez–Thompson correlation, anchored to 21 December 2012 = 4 Ajaw.
The astrolabe clock beside the strip is drawn from the same data: a twelve-glyph zodiac ring, a Roman hour ring, and the date and time struck underneath in Roman numerals.