What is the relationship between the zodiac and the calendar?

Mr. Liu Yaohan, a ethnologist, believes that the dates of the zodiac and the "Zodiac" are related to the "October Calendar" method of the Yi people.

Yi people living in Daliangshan area of Sichuan have a calendar with twelve kinds of animals as the date of the year. They use twelve kinds of animals as the date of the year. Today is the Year of the Rat and tomorrow is the Year of the Ox. By analogy, three rounds is a month, 36 days, a month is 36 days, and a year is ten months. This is the later "October calendar" method. Mr. Liu Yaohan believes that the October calendar, which marks the dates according to the Chinese zodiac, came into being in the Xia and Yu Dynasties (see Liu Yaohan's Collection of Social and Historical Investigation of the Yi People), which is related to the primitive totem worship. The zodiac was influenced by the October calendar, and the Yi zodiac calendar later developed into the zodiac.

When we talk about the origin of the zodiac, we must associate it with heavenly stems and earthly branches. The oldest existing branch table in China unearthed from the Yin Ruins in Anyang in modern times shows that the date of branches in the Yin and Shang Dynasties has been mastered. Later, with the passage of time, the functions of the branches gradually diversified. As a label as a time unit, on the one hand, it is extended and used in chronology; On the one hand, it reduces the time (twelve hours a day). According to historical records and textual research, the zodiac appeared after the establishment of the "branch chronology" Twelve kinds of animals correspond to the twelve earthly branches one by one, and animals are the signs of earthly branches. People born in the same year all have their own animals, so twelve kinds of animals are used to date the year and calculate each person's zodiac. It can be seen that the zodiac and the twelve earthly branches are inseparable. For a long time, scholars have found that the ancient Chinese characters of the zodiac contain the information of the zodiac. They compared the ancient Chinese characters of the Chinese zodiac with those of the Chinese zodiac, and found that the ancient Chinese characters of the Chinese zodiac were related to twelve kinds of animals. Careful observation shows that there are some similarities and some differences. In Xu Shen's Shuo Wen Jie Zi in the Eastern Han Dynasty, the word "Ji" was described as a pictographic character of a snake, as well as "Hai" and "tapir". People nearby have also verified that there are similarities between the characters of the earthly branches in Oracle Bone Inscriptions and the inscriptions on bronze inscriptions and the characters of the zodiac, which makes people wonder whether the zodiac is the pictographic characters of the animals of the zodiac. Because the ugly shade and ugly hair of the twelve earthly branches are easy to remember, people use twelve kinds of animals instead, and animals instead of ordinal numbers to match the earthly branches, which becomes the symbol system of the year. Although the above conjecture has certain credibility, if you think about it carefully, you can still judge that the zodiac can't be pictographs of the zodiac, because as mentioned earlier, the zodiac was skillfully used in the Yin and Shang Dynasties, while the zodiac was only produced in the Spring and Autumn Period and came from different sources. If the earthly branches are related to the zodiac when creating characters, wouldn't the zodiac be produced at the same time as the earthly branches?

To sum up, the author thinks that the zodiac appeared later than the twelve earthly branches, but it is closely related to the twelve earthly branches. The zodiac is an appendage of the twelve earthly branches. Choosing twelve animals as symbols instead of the twelve earthly branches stems from the animal worship psychology of the ancients.