This is an illustration from a 1937 edition of Natural History magazine, an article called “Chinese Design.” This is a “Disk of Heaven,” or bi, a slightly mysterious object that was both a symbol of social status and maybe kind of sort of a religious item, a symbolic gateway or portal to Heaven – you could (maybe) talk through it and have your words heard On High, as it were. Bi like these have been found in ancient graves, and have been popular on and off (and likely in very different ways) since the Neolithic period, so we’re talking about a thing that people have been making and using since before English was a language, since before Moses was Moses. That’s enough time for attitudes to change and change again.
I got this, as I mentioned, out of a natural history magazine which I found on archive.org. The red symbols off to one side indicate that this item has the following design elements: a dragon (which have “a good rather than evil influence” for the Chinese), a “Cosmic Symbol of the Deity Heaven” (a perforated disk, which this article suggests is a symbol of Heaven personified as a god), and clouds (which surround dragons or immortals). It’s interesting to me that this sort of cultural anthropology or even art history study would be considered “natural history” as much as the habits of elephant seals or something, but that’s how science changes over time.