Traveling Trunk

Many people know about the twelve animals of the zodiac from the placemats at their local Chinese restaurant. What they do not know is that there is great legend behind the zodiac and that its roots lie in Chinese astrology. Chinese astrology dates back 5,000 years while the Chinese zodiac has a history of 2,000 years (57). The creation of this system provided people with a simple way to associate a person’s birth year with personality traits.

The Chinese believed that many factors about a person’s birth (including year, month, day, and even time) could give insight about the person’s destiny. An easy way to pinpoint these traits is to associate the person with the traits of an animal. The number twelve was picked because the zodiac was based on the rotation of the planet Jupiter. It took Jupiter twelve years to rotate around the sun (58). Each year was assigned an animal: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and boar.

Chinese astronomers still use the complex method of calculating the position of the planets, sun, moon, and comets at the time of birth to foretell a person’s destiny. It is much more fun to do this by aligning oneself with the traits of an animal. A common mistake is to think that your year is a lucky year. The year of your animal is actually the year that you must be most careful and try to avoid the negative traits associated with your animal (59).