Fire Rooster

For the resident astrologers, mystics, fortune tellers, and all other heretics. The year 2017 is the year of Fire Rooster according to Chinese zodiac, and this is what the next year is predicted to be like:

karmaweather.com/2017-year- … e-rooster/

I don’t know what that means, but I guess if you unlock the secret of the numbers you could have a prosperious year.

By the way, 2018 is going to be the year of the Earth Dog, and Trump was born in the year of the Fire Dog, in 1946, on June 14th (which was also a day of total lunar eclipse).
2018 could be his year (if he makes it that long). This, of course, is all gibberish in my opinion, but I do not discount its effect on people’s psychologies, which, historically, has been great. Many people in power have been superstitious and have based their actions on astrology or other ‘signs’. Pagan Kings consulted ‘seers’ and Christian/Muslim also sought advice and blessing of the ‘holy men’ before a big undertaking. So if one has a lot of power and responsibility and just doesn’t know the right action to take, (and wants to shift responsibilities a bit) he just might turn to super-natural order for advice. It’s really surprising how many people still believe in it.

My Chinese horoscope animal is a rooster… a shitty god damn rooster for chrise sakes, but what is a fire rooster?

I think each animal is assigned a core element and each year is assigned an element, so a Rooster, whose core element is metal can have a year in which it is government by metal (its own element) earth, fire, wood, and water, in a cyclical 12-yr rotation. So guess it would be: 1921 (metal/gold) → 1933(water) → 1945(wood) → 1957(fire) → 1969(earth) → 1981(metal/gold) → 1993(water) → 2005(wood) → 2017(fire) → 2029(earth).

The forecasters say that the balancing elements for this year (fire) are metal and water. Water makes sense, but I don’t see how metal balances fire (probably they were just trying to sell their jewelry charms)
youtube.com/watch?v=gdTLqWpe_30
Mags, for you, beware the ides of March! Just stay on a wooden boat somewhere, away from metal, fire and rabbits. [-o<

But seriously, how all of this gets assigned and arranged I have no clue, I think old wise and bored Chinese people come up with that over drinking tea and smoking pipe. It’s entertaining, though.

Came via a few phases, ancient china, at least the Xia-Shang, were fairly well connected to the western world, they have the cosmogony built into their statecraft, who invented and did what in what office, while in the west we just assigned it to heros and gods. It’s origins are in theriphorphic river gods, similar to the goddess in my “I Lost A Temple” thread.

The first major revision of the I Ching was supposedly by King Wu of the Zhou, as he was imprisoned by King Zhou of the Shang. We’ve found evidence aspects of I Chung predates this, and we certainly don’t use his system, if he ever made a version at all, because grave texts tend to look radically different from the system employed today, and one another for that matter. We have some nice ones displayed in DC.

Proto-Daoists continued with these logical schemes,and under full blown Daoism, they started focusing heavily on alchemy, with alot of paralleled investigations of near chemistry to near psychology, with heavy doses of where the fuck did this shit come from.

Around the 9th century you start having Ying-Yang formulas, based on studies of bihemispheric brain anatomy (yes,its anatomical, was originally science oriented).

You had similar systems blundering around India and Byzantium.

I’m honestly not too into the daoist systems, I was thinking about takingba job in china a whike back to look into it first hand, but didn’t, so instead I don’t bother. Why focus on western systems and not chinese? I just have better access to western works. When I come across a chinese work, it is more in line to a historic figure or a philosopher, I learn bits here and there, nothing systemmatic. I will remedy this later on.

I do recommend looking into early chinese mathematics though, they often were ahead of the west, and they use a wide variety of decises,including the magic square you listed aboce in the op.

My post got lost, but what I was saying is that it seems logical as far as progression of elements is concerned, in theory, but how does it get established in the actual world, other than just being superimposed on it? So, if we have an exceptionally hot year and a water sign was originally assigned to it, does it not automatically switch to fire sign? And if, for example, the last ice age lasted 10,000 years, wouldn’t that whole period be governed by a water element? Shouldn’t element designation follow the event, and not the other way? When did the cycle even start, does it have to be so rigid, and does it have to obey lunar cycles? It would make more sense to assign elements to events, or after the fact, as in postdiction, rather than trying to predict them as if everything follows strict textbook order (though maybe that’s how the system originally came about-through some observation). I do not deny that there is a certain sense of order based on earth’s rotation (change of seasons, etc.) and some things can be forecasted ahead of time, but to superimpose an ideological order, based on principles alone upon the actual world doesn’t seem like a wise undertaking, unless it is a mainly a psychological/political scheme, buffered by justifications/denials (if it doesn’t work) and confirmation biases (if it does). In that way, it would simply be like any other fortune telling. I would look into political environment (power struggles) during which this system came about and how it came to be ingrained into culture. It seems that superstition is powerful psychological force, especially in Asia.

If you really want to do that, I can link you to some online translations of really Chinese works from the early Zhou that jumps back and forth from religious rituals and magic to statecraft as feasible pragmatic tactical and political awareness.

The ideological didn’t start till just prior to the French revolution. It’s a artificial construct central to modern dialogue, but isn’t real as far as we like to unify things.

Really is just cognitive ordering, once technology or social circumstances favor a type that type explodes in new activity. My favorite theorist likes to focus on INTJ businessmen, he thinks more or less prior to modern capitalism and computers we didn’t do shit, and so were under selected sexually as we didn’t sparkle like some others can. Not true at all, history is full of us, Machiavelli, Emperor Augustus, Sun Tzu… but admittedly you go back far enough, we reach a point where our collection of traits couldn’t if been too crucial. I think it wasn’t till the nomadic age that we even got our start, when we spread out of Africa, and only then as navigators, figuring out how to keep everyone fed on the advance.

That isn’t really a wildly primate centric idea, we were tree dwellers, fruits and insects, occasional forest floor scavenging. All our living relatives limit themselves to that, outside a foray with a stick into the occasional termite mound. Our ability to map and plan started here, we’re the best at it, but everyone would have it unconsciously if some are increasingly conscious of it. Note with no written or spoken languages, no real descriptive art, no maps… are maps “ideological”? No and Yes… Like I said, Ideology is a modern invention, we apply it to the past, but maps don’t have this application, even though they are evolving ideas, philosophical presumptions of what is a map, how you use it change constantly. A Periplus isn’t a 17th century ship chart, and that’s not a natal astrology chart, they relate, but are used quite differently, using very different but interrelated modes of thought that use one another, but focus on other things in terms of emphasis. You have GPS, Google Earth, in real time. That’s wildly ideological, but it doesn’t occur to us anymore it is. Just seems outside the realm of intellectual ideas, it no longer has a apparent ordering logic that cascades from one aspect of the mind to the next in choices we have to make and understand. That’s the forfront of technology, seems very real, very accurate, we’ve lost our skepticism, and our insights into the differentia mapping as a broad category is capable of. It’s gonna take some time to bust out of this philosophy of space theorizing. Earlier eras, like Cicero, approached memory, imagination and space as mapping, periplus was a list of distances, no images for a map, and termini- boundaries, was a God of boundry stones, people worshipped Hermes along side this, like Cynics and Vagabonds, living off the cuff and thieving. Brigands lived in the hidden and inaccessible. Characters like Robinhood defied kings or emperors, in accord with macho fortune.

Not in our GPS, yet GPS was designed to handle troops on battlefields using guerilla tactics that emphasize all that. “You are here” isn’t on Sun Tzu’s map of Formlessness, but the ideological guerilla emphasizes this to this day.

That’s mapping. One category, all over the place. Multiple modes of mind go into that, order- geometry- meaning- all different in methods that arrive to each. Different methods stem from different styles of thinking.

Structuralism, power politics, it can’t see thus map, presumes it is already there. Why I don’t advocate such systems.

Is the mathematical logic underpinning I Ching gua a precursor to the binary system?

I think we just followed the animals.

Writing or record keeping would have been essential to it, I think. Also, I don’t think maps can exist without recording motion, or time-keeping. The first time-keeping was celestial (moon, planet movement), later imitated by mechanical gadgets. Chinese astronomy existed before astrology and its function was measuring time and making calendars (probably for agricultural or some other practical purposes). Arabs were also very astronomy based.

Both are based on time keeping - calculating distances with passage of time, and one would still need some sort of record keeping for that. Imagine having to travel across the desert with supplies, do I take 2 days worth or 2 weeks worth of food and water? And to know your current approximate position in the desert you’d just add/subtract the days you were travelling. Periplus would also have to describe locations in terms of time of passage, and GPS also does it, only through satellites. So, basically, with maps, you’re doing time keeping, and that also requires record keeping, or some sort of writing.

The mathematical logic changes era to era, I own a few books on Amazon.com on this issue, recommend looking into it, the free downloads offer a lot of info.

And what happens when you get lost and need to do corrections? Some systems are better than others in doing that.

There are mapping techniques using intuitive mathematics that don’t even have a time varient yet involved, it’s purely coincidental intuition and symmetry.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=X0RAvid6NBw

You likewise can have spacial aspects minus time, or time is played in bizarre manners, such as semi-conscious repetitive loops of eternity where cause and effect isn’t universally synchronized, leading to categorical entropy in some places, not in others. (magsj, you finished that video yet?). A lot if religion conceptions of space, be it the Tablet of Cebes or Dante’s inferno, are without time. It exists now as then, despite the seep of new characters. You would fully expect to see Nixon in Dante’s He’ll, Purgatory, or Heaven… but shit otherwise wouldn’t change.

I might…

If by going to the Chinese buffet is joining in, then maybe.

They’ll probably have firecrackers and freebies galore… or at least free fortune cookies and green tea and plenty of msg to go with… :wink:

I’ll just have to make do with a wander around Soho and a black Lavazza… hold the (processed granulated) sugar. =;

You know, that’s pretty racist of you to stereotype all Asians as likeing those things. I think you should tab that. Only people who want to read your racist crap should be reading it, they can untab it to read your demented worldview.

More a jokey realism than a racist demented worldview… traditional fare is generally served at traditional fairs.

This guy is funny:

youtube.com/watch?v=KbKbrOMHkD0

youtube.com/watch?v=RLkaBKMF6OE (on Chinese)

In Chinese astrology I am a Wood Dragon but I do not take it seriously
It can be interesting to study but beyond that has nothing to offer me

…I simply plan to get into the spirit of it all Surrep… get out, get some fresh air, stretch my legs, and soak in some Chinese culture on the biggest day in their events calendar… and probably bump into a friend or 20 along the way :smiley:

Btw, I’m not sure what element was going on in 1969 and therefore what element I was born under, but a spot of research on Google and I’ll soon know.