A curious idea which is attested across all continents is that of a “lost Pleiad”, in which one of the stars in the Pleiades cluster– generally called sisters, virgins, maidens, and so one — fades, either from death, abduction, or even shame. Often, they are menaced by men identified with the constellation Orion. The astronomer…

Emilie Savage-Smith is, undoubtedly, a brilliant scholar and a pre-eminent historian of science. Her monograph with Marion B. Smith on the enigmatic “divination tablet” (below) currently housed at the British Museum has been indispensable to me personally in my current research trajectories. Thus her persistent claim that geomantic dice (found in a variety of medieval,…

Ron Eglash, a mathematician-cum-anthropologist at the University of Michigan School of Information, makes an interesting claim: that geomancy, particularly the sort practiced by Ifa and Bamana diviners in Africa, is at the very origin of computer science. Such a claim is intriguing, of course, especially given my own interest in astrology’s relation to computing —…

The Enmei Jukku Kannon Gyō is a relatively enigmatic, and incredibly short, sutra mainly practiced in Japan, but probably originating in China. Comparison of translations There are a lot of translations floating around on the internet — luckily the sutra itself is so short that they can all be compared, line-by-line, in a single table….

Certainly one of the earliest astrological calculators known, the 式 shì is an ancient Chinese analog computer dating sometime before 165 BCE. Generally, the most primitive form is composed of two parts: a free-spinning, circular 天盤 tiānpán “heaven plate,” marked with the Big Dipper and centered on the pole star, set inside a square, stationary…

This is a rough draft of my translation of the prologue to the 覺世經 Jueshijing, the World Awakening Scripture, revealed by 關帝 Guandi probably in the late Ming or early Qing. The Chinese text which I have provided is from my critical edition, sans the apparatus, which I synthesized from several different manuscripts and inscriptions….