Nhật Nguyệt

About Nhật Nguyệt

Four kinds of knowledge on Nhật Nguyệt

A lunar date, a festival, a birth chart and a personality type cannot be checked the same way. Every article and tool carries a label at the top saying which of the kinds below it belongs to.

Calendar and astronomy

Lunar dates, solar terms, stems and branches, days and hours. The same input always gives the same result, and the result can be cross-checked against a printed almanac or an independent calculation. An error here is a calculation error, and it is fixed as one.

Article topics: Lunar calendar

Tools:

Culture and belief

Customs, festivals, beliefs, traditional crafts, history and Vietnam's ethnic communities. The site records what people do and believe, and does not rule on whether the belief is true. What can be checked is whether the record matches the documents: dates, places, names, rites and sources.

Article topics: Traditional festivals, Tet and seasonal rites, Vu Lan festival, Festival customs, Tet customs, Regional customs, Regions, Folk belief, Ethnic minority belief, Ancestor worship, Buddhism, Life-cycle rites, Ethnic minority customs, Vietnam's ethnic communities, Traditional crafts, Traditional performing arts, Traditional dress, Traditional food, Vietnamese commemorative days, Historical figures, Folk taboos

Tools:

Traditional divination

Tử Vi, Bát Tự, the I Ching used for divination, feng shui, face reading, date selection and age compatibility. These are long-standing interpretive systems with their own books and schools, and they have no scientific basis. The site presents them as the books do, says where the schools disagree, and makes no claim that they work. Charts and tables are computed by machine under the books' conventions; what can be checked is whether the machine follows those conventions correctly, not whether a reading fits anyone's life.

Article topics: Vietnamese astrology, Zi Wei Dou Shu, BaZi, Saju, Tam Thức, Feng shui, Vastu Shastra, Feng shui stones, Five Elements, I Ching, Physiognomy, Face reading, Palmistry, Folk divination, Zodiac animals, The twelve zodiac animals, Date selection, Date and hour selection, Astrology, Western astrology

Tools:

Modern system

MBTI, the Enneagram, Human Design, name-and-birthday numerology, Tarot and playing-card divination. Many borrow old names or symbols but took shape recently: name-and-birthday numerology formed in the late 19th century and only borrows Pythagorean number philosophy; Tarot began in the 15th century as a card game, was used for divination from the late 18th century, and the reading style common today took shape with the Rider-Waite deck of 1909. The site does not present them as ancient traditions, and states the state of research where there is any.

Article topics: Numerology, Tarot, Western cartomancy, MBTI, Enneagram, Human Design

Tools:

Topics between two kinds

The I Ching is a classical text and is also used for divination; an almanac is calendar arithmetic plus a date-selection convention. In such cases the label gives the kind that covers most of the content, and tools say which part is computed and which is convention, as in the list above. The 64-hexagram reference tool is filed under culture because it reads the text; I Ching articles are filed under divination because most of them read hexagrams to answer questions.

Articles that analyse these systems through psychology or the philosophy of science carry no label: they do not present a system, they examine systems from outside.

Labels inside an article

An article belongs to one kind, but its paragraphs are not all checkable to the same degree. A label at the start of a paragraph covers the whole paragraph; a label inside a paragraph covers only the dotted-underlined sentence after it. Paragraphs without a label are Nhật Nguyệt's own framing and explanation.

Calendar fact

Computed by calendar arithmetic, and checkable against a printed almanac or an independent calculation. Lookup rules of divination, such as placing stars or spirit-stars, are a book's convention even when a machine computes them, so they carry the school label.

Historical record

Backed by a document, a date and a source; the note number beside it points to that source.

Folk belief

What people believe, avoid or pass on by word of mouth, recorded as a belief, not as a checked fact.

School's interpretation

How one school or one book reads it; other schools may read it differently. Where known, the label names the school or the book.

Not enough evidence

Someone has claimed it, but no source or study is strong enough to confirm it.

Editorial processCorrections and known issues