This year’s vernal equinox brought a solar eclipse that was
visible across northern Eurasia. To view totality, you had to be on the Faroe
Islands, 62° north between Scotland
and Iceland, or the Svalbard group between Norway and the North Pole at 74° to 81° north.
I missed it entirely, and only saw the news the next day. But I kept my head, unlike the drunken
astronomers of ancient China.
(This is expanded and revised from an article published by
The Sidereal Times (April 2015) of the Austin Astronomical Society.)
The story of Hsi and Ho came to my colleague Bradford S. Wade and me
while we met often at The Tower Inn Cafe in Ypsilanti, across the street from Eastern Michigan
University. We had a class
together, Ethics in Physics with Dr. Patrick Koehn. After a few meetings or maybe only after a few beers, we
took up a joint publication, a review of Astronomical
Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins by Marshall Faintich. We placed that in the Bulletin of the Society for the History of
Astronomy, Issue 21, Spring 2011.
As for the drunken astronomers, the stories vary and are often retold, especially by sky gazers, but
the teaching point is easy. Hsi (also given as Hi or He) and Ho were
the court astronomers. Among their
duties, they were responsible for predicting eclipses so that people could beat
gongs, shoot arrows, and otherwise scare off the dragon that was eating the
sun. However, they spent most of
their time drinking rice wine, so they not only failed to predict an eclipse, but
they also slept through it.
Fortunately for all of us, the common people rallied and chased the
demon away. Hsi and Ho were
executed.
The story comes from an ancient manuscript known as The Book of Documents, which has been
variously rendered as Shu-king, Shu Ching, Shujing, and Shangshu. (Wikipedia
has an entry, of course: Book of Documents.) The story of Hsi and Ho comes from the fourth part, fifth
book, thirteenth chapter. There,
the chancellor, prime minister, or “prince” Yi Ying exhorts government
officials not to be derelict in their duties as were Hsi and Ho. All of that
happened in legendary times. (The
earliest attested date in Chinese history is equivalent to 831 BCE.) The most likely date for the eclipse in
question is October 22, 2137 BCE.
You can find some reliable modern detail at the Astronomy Today website. Put “ancient eclipses” in the search
box and it should come up first after the Google Ads. The story of Hsi and Ho is in Part I. The story is
embellished in Totality:
Eclipses of the Sun, by
Mark Littmann, Fred Espenak, and Ken Willcox (Oxford 1991; also on Google
Books). A brief note about the drunken Chinese astronomers, ending with an original poem, appeared in The Journal of the
Astronomical Society of India, vol. 4. No. 3, Jan. 1914. It was cited as coming
from The Observatory for December
1913. Indeed, it did appear in Volume XXXVI, Number 468, page 478. The author was C. Thomas Edgar
The pages below are from The
Chinese Classics, Volume 3: The Shoo King or Book of Historical Documents
by James Legge, first published by the author at Hong Kong in 1865, then
reprinted with errata and corrigenda by Clarendon Press, Oxford
1893-1895. Below these lines
are lengthy glosses on the nuances of the grammar and syntax of the ideograms. A modern version (with only a few
notes) was edited by Clae Waltham and published by Gateway Editions from Henry
Regnery, Chicago, 1971. You will see that at first Hsi and Ho are the family names of two sets of brothers. Then, they became individuals. Also, Legge's translation was before even the Wade-Giles system and is far from the modern Pinyang rules.
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