Liu, the Willow of the Vermilion Bird

Liu, the Willow, is the twenty-fourth of the twenty-eight xiu and the third mansion of the southern palace, the Vermilion Bird. Its name means willow, identified with a curving line of stars in Hydra, seen as the beak or crop of the celestial bird. In the later astrological tradition its animal totem is the Roe Deer. As one of the twenty-eight lunar mansions it tracks a segment of the Moon's monthly circuit. These are the conventions of the Chinese astronomical and calendrical tradition, in which the twenty-eight xiu order the heavens into four palaces of seven mansions each; the mansion the Moon occupies on a given night contributes to the almanac's reckoning of the day's suitable and unsuitable undertakings.

Liu's curving line of stars in Hydra, read as the celestial bird's beak or crop, belongs to a stretch of the ecliptic the Vedic tradition divides very differently, assigning the equivalent region chiefly to Ashlesha's coiled-serpent imagery in Hydra's head rather than to any bird figure, a clear case of the Chinese and Indian systems drawing entirely unrelated animal symbolism from the very same physical group of stars rather than inheriting a shared image through direct contact.