Kuí Xiù Wǔ

The name carried by this entry is not a garbled Arabic star-name but a Chinese catalogue designation: Kui Su wu, the fifth star of Kui, the fifteenth of the twenty-eight xiu or lunar mansions into which Chinese astronomy divided the sky. The Kui mansion, usually rendered Legs or Straddler, is one of the seven mansions of the White Tiger of the west, and its stars lie across the modern constellations of Andromeda and Pisces, which is why an Andromeda star should carry the name at all. Chinese mansion stars are numbered in sequence within the mansion rather than named individually, so designations of this form are positional labels, and identifying which modern star is meant requires care, since the determinative star of Kui itself was changed between earlier practice and the Qing dynasty. The tone marks that make the pinyin correct are what render badly in a plain ASCII display.

The mansions themselves are constructed on a different plan from the schemes an astrologer is likely to know. The Indian nakshatras and the Arabic manazil both divide the ecliptic, and both do it into equal or near equal parts. The Chinese xiu divide the celestial equator, and they are of very unequal width, some spanning more than thirty degrees and others only a couple. A xiu is bounded by the hour circle through its determinative star and runs from pole to pole, so it is a wedge of the whole sky rather than a segment of the zodiacal band. That is why a xiu can contain a star as far north as Andromeda, and why a xiu position cannot simply be converted into a nakshatra or a sign.

Names of this kind reached western astrology by an indirect route. Nineteenth-century compilers of star lore, above all Richard Hinckley Allen in Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning (1899), gathered Arabic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic and Chinese designations for the same objects side by side, often at second hand and in inconsistent romanisations. Twentieth-century astrological compilations, Vivian Robson's among them, drew their star lists from such reference works, and the mixed nomenclature came with them; that is why a single astrological star catalogue can hold Arabic descriptive names, Latin translations of Greek positions and Chinese mansion numbers in the same column. No traditional Ptolemaic planetary nature is recorded for this star. Its interest is in the position it marks within the figure of Andromeda and in the reminder that the fixed-star lists are a compilation, layered out of several traditions rather than handed down whole.

What follows for a reader meeting this entry is practical. A designation of this form names a position within a mansion and does not name an object in the way an Arabic star name attempts to; the informative unit is the mansion, not the numbered star inside it. This atlas holds the twenty eight xiu as their own type, so the useful move from here is to the mansion rather than to any planetary nature, and no planetary nature should be supplied for a star that never had one in the tradition the name comes from. Reading a Ptolemaic nature onto a Chinese positional label would be inventing a correspondence between two systems that never made one.