Chapter 3 Chapter two

And let us push our eyes to the remote depths of history to explore the source of the birth and development of China. We often say that the Chinese nation has a long history of five thousand years, so its origin can be traced back to 3000 BC.The dawn of oriental civilization dawned on the era of the legendary "Three Emperors and Five Emperors".The Emperor of Heaven, Emperor of Earth, and Emperor of Man are called the "Three Emperors", and Fuxi, Shennong, Yellow Emperor, Yao, and Shun are called the "Five Emperors".In fact, the Chinese nation at that time had initially shaken off the primitive state of ignorance, completed the revolutionary transformation from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age, appeared animal husbandry and agriculture, and began to live securely and in a fixed area. land.

From our perspective today, people at that time were still living in a primitive barbaric state.As everyone knows, it is this ray of dawn of civilization that first appeared on the heads of the Chinese nation - the legendary age, and it is also the result of millions of years of human beings struggling in the "dark age" of ignorance. According to relevant archaeological data, about five million years ago, human beings slowly evolved from ancient apes to hominids; about four million years ago, hominids were born; about three million years ago, humans entered the Paleolithic Age, No different from other animals, wandering around to find and collect food for a living; about half a million years ago, the direct ancestor of human beings, Homo erectus, appeared and learned to make stone tools and use fire; about 10,000 years ago, humans Entering the Neolithic Age, people became people in the modern sense who could think, use language to communicate, and create culture; about 5,000 years ago, the Bronze Age began, and the history of human civilization officially kicked off.

Compared with 5,000 years and 4 million years, the history of human civilization is too short and too short. "The world is dark and yellow, and the universe is prehistoric." When we stand today with a high level of material and spiritual civilization, it is really hard to imagine how difficult and cruel the living environment faced by ancient humans, and how barbaric and ignorant their way of life must be.Perhaps, only among the few primitive tribes who still live in the wilderness, isolated islands, deep mountains and old forests for a long time, can we see some faint figures of early humans.

"Who am I? Where did I come from, and where am I going? Could it be that on this blue planet, in the eternal journey of time, am I just a passer-by?" And darkness, when Nuwa created a group of soulful individuals standing on the vast eastern horizon, when our ancestors first picked off the wide leaves to cover the naked shame, this ancient and modern question has been entangled , hovering in the hearts of human beings with subject consciousness.During the long and difficult existence, they were unable to understand those mysterious nature and natural phenomena, and came up with the concept of "animism".Not to mention animals such as tigers, leopards, bears, wolves, snakes, fishes, and birds that run, fly, or swim, even a growing weed, a dead tree, or an immovable stone can communicate with spirituality, and the brightness of the sun, the moon The waxing and waning of the sky, the howling of the strong wind, the drifting of rain and snow, the flickering of electric light, and the roar of thunder are some kind of thinking and behavior of the high gods.Since everything has animism, everything in the world is always dominated by a high god, and there is always a mysterious force controlling and manipulating it.As a result, superstitious concepts of ghosts and gods that worship supernatural and alien forces arose.In the practice of production and life, one of the strongest psychological tendencies is the desire to predict the consequences of the future.Where there are consequences, there must be antecedents.They believe that the consequences are already contained in the antecedents; conversely, the upcoming consequences can also be inferred from the antecedents.This antecedent or pre-phenomena is what the ancients called precursors, omens, and omens.With the superstitious concept of ghosts and gods, people mistakenly believe that omens are mysterious signals presented to people by ghosts and gods—a kind of omen, enlightenment or warning.Whether the consequences are bad or good, it is the intentional punishment or reward of ghosts and gods.However, people's cultural mentality always seeks good luck and avoids bad luck. When ancient humans transformed the psychological guidance brought about by the precursory superstition of seeking good luck and avoiding bad luck into external forms, witchcraft came into being.

The main form of primitive religion is witchcraft, which can be expressed in various ways, such as practices, incantations, talismans, and divination. At the beginning of witchcraft's germination, it had a primitive "apocalypse" nature, and it worshiped all kinds of normal and common or weird and rare natural phenomena that were covered with mystery.These objects have not been artificially processed and transformed, and maintain their true state of being for themselves. Under the "guidance" of the animistic view of all things, people combine and connect them with other things related to life. The result is the result.Over time, a set of fixed patterns of connection between things and things has been formed, which has been accumulated in the depths of the human mind and passed down from generation to generation.For example, when people hear the cry of a crow, they think it is a bad omen and are afraid to avoid it; but when they hear the chirping of a magpie, they think it is a happy event and they are elated.The calls of crows and magpies have not been modified. Only by inspiration and apocalypse, the omens and good news that have no necessary logical connection with them are connected respectively. Therefore, a primitive witchcraft that does not require any divination rituals is performed in the individual self. completed in the mind.

Human beings entered the Neolithic Age, and the evolution of thinking and language gave birth to the early apocalyptic witchcraft.With the progress of the ancestors and the gradual deepening of their understanding of nature, human factors gradually infiltrated into witchcraft.Therefore, witchcraft began to slowly transition to its second stage in the legendary era of the Three Emperors and Five Emperors, adding natural objects slightly modified by manpower as divination tools, and creating simple precursors as divination symbols.And the representative figure who completed this historical significance is Fuxi.

According to the "Book of Changes Xici Xiazhuan": "In ancient times, Bao Xi was the king of the world. Those who look up look at the sky, and those who look down look at the law. Take all the body, take all things from afar, so I started to make gossip, to understand the virtue of the gods, and to empathize with all things." That is to say, it was Fuxi (that is, Bao Xi) who learned from the nature of heaven and earth in the process of divination. Get inspired, thus invent and create gossip. Fuxi is a turning point for ancient human beings to face themselves from looking up to the sky in fear and trepidation.He is the legendary ancestor of mankind, the crystallization of the marriage between Nuwa's brothers and sisters.He is proficient in primitive production and living skills, teaching people to weave nets for fishing and hunting, and to domesticate animals for animal husbandry.He is a god in people's minds, but also an out-and-out person, a deified person.The cultural information revealed by Fuxi’s life experience and legends shows that the human beings who have been prostrate on the ground for a long time raised their heads and straightened their waists. Self-esteem and self-confidence began to surge in the hearts of the ancestors. capitalized.

According to the "Hongdong County Chronicles", the place where Fuxi performed gossip was in Guadi Village in the county. There is a Fuxi temple and Fuxi tomb in the village, and there is a trigram painting platform in the village.With Guadi Village as the center, there are eight villages around it, all of which are eight miles away from Guadi Village, in the shape of a Taiji pattern, which respectively represent Gankan, Zhenxun, and Kunduigen in the Eight Diagrams, which in turn mark Tianshui Lei Feng Huo Di Ze Mountain. In addition, there are still many places in the country where there are Fuxi temples and Fuxi tombs, all of which indicate and compete for the invention right of Fuxi to create gossip.But I think the most credible one is the Fuxi Bagua Terrace located in Luokou Village, Shayugou Township, Gongyi City, Henan Province.At the bottom of a deep ditch, there is a circular earthen altar about two feet high and an area of ​​about two mu. The earthen altar faces the confluence of the Yellow River and Luohe River in the north and Lianhua Mountain in the south.Back then, Fuxi was most likely sitting and lying quietly on this earthen altar, leaning against the high mountain and looking down at the earth. "Don't you see, the water of the Yellow River comes up from the sky, rushing to the sea and never returning." And the Luo River, because of the savings of one winter and one spring, poured a torrent into the Yellow River to help its momentum.The Yellow River is turbid, and the Luoshui is clear, one black and one white, with clear distinctions between Wei and Wei.Tangtang and floods are separated, swaying Huaishan and Xiangling, the Yellow River and Luoshui are stirring each other, the clear and turbid confluence, black and white are distinct, forming a huge vortex, rolling and spreading to the distant sky.Fuxi stared fixedly, his heart suddenly brightened, and a flash of inspiration flashed across: one is clear and one is turbid, one is black and one is white, one is yin and one is yang, mutual tolerance, there is me in you, and you in me. What is this wonderful picture containing everything in the world?As a result, Fuxi's heart was ups and downs, just like the surging water of Huangluo, and he couldn't help but draw it casually, and there was the Yin-Yang Taiji diagram we see today.The black is yin, and the yin is empty, which is represented by a symbol -; the white is yang, and the yang is real, and the symbol is -.With black and white yin and yang, and virtual and real codes, isn't it a logical thing to overlap them in threes and combine them to form gossip?

In fact, it is not important where Fuxishi drew the gossip. It is doubtful whether Fuxishi really lived in our world. From the word "shi" attached to it, we There is reason to speculate that Fuxi is actually a great clan group, the people of the whole tribe gradually learned to fish, hunt and animal husbandry, invented the Taiji diagram, and deduced Yin-Yang and Eight Diagrams through long-term production and life practice.Therefore, what we value is the gossip, a simple yet complex abstract symbol itself.Gua, which is synonymous with "hanging", refers to hanging everything on it, which has the meaning of covering the world and all things in the universe, and also reflects the desire for knowledge and understanding that was throbbing in the hearts of the early ancestors.

The second phase of witchcraft has a cultural attribute of half apocalypse and half man-made, forming a more regular divination operation process, and has professional fortune-tellers who are proficient in this way. So far, the Chinese nation has finally transitioned from the chaotic ignorance, from the era of unproven legends to the era of sporadic records of half-belief history.Although the ancestors at this time have not yet got rid of the barbaric, weird and mysterious atmosphere, they have taken a welcome step on the difficult road of creating civilization after all. The second phase of witchcraft was established by Fuxi, passed through the Xia Dynasty, the first autocratic dynasty in the history of our country, which was passed down from father to son, and reached its peak in the Yin and Shang Dynasties. Its main form is oracle bone divination.

The armor is tortoise shell, and the bone is ox bone.The tortoise is tenacious, long-lived and full of aura; the cow is full of physical strength, combining brute force and tameness, both of which were regarded as spiritual objects and gods by the ancients.They were used as the first choice for divination, in order to increase the authority of witchcraft.When the ancestors who mainly engaged in fishing, hunting and animal husbandry slaughtered turtles and cattle for food, the tortoise shells and cattle bones would crack and crack in the blazing barbecue, leaving all kinds of unique crack marks.It is very coincidental that a lucky or sad thing suddenly broke out in the crackling of the tortoise shell, and the ancestors would naturally associate the two together, and regard the popping and cracking as a superstition of the fate of life. .Later, the ancestors intentionally burned the bones of tortoise shells and cattle to artificially create some so-called precursors to predict the consequences and deduce the future.So far, a total of 150,000 such tortoise shell and ox bones have been unearthed in the Yin Ruins, which shows how popular tortoise shell divination was at that time. Judging from the existing unearthed oracle bones, the early oracle bones were quite rough, mostly natural; the middle and late oracle bones were regular in shape, relatively smooth on the surface, and obviously marked with artificial traces, which also shows the combination of apocalypse and man-made. Oracle bone divination has a set of strict and standardized operating ceremonies. It is presided over by a special divination historian or chastity person. First, listen to the content and purpose of the seeker, and pray for the omnipresent gods to communicate and help each other repeatedly in their hearts; Select tortoises and kill tortoises, modify the tortoise shell, burn and drill; then observe the omens, decipher the explanations to determine good and bad; finally, engrave inscriptions on the tortoise shell for verification, and also to increase the solemnity and sanctity of divination. It is quite interesting that our national quintessence of square Chinese characters jumped out in the witchcraft of divination again and again.They are attached to and fixed on the tortoise shell and developed into a regular language system, which is still widely used today and is becoming more and more scientific and popular.That is to say, in terms of divination, the word "Bu" is shaped like cracks formed by roasting oracle bones, and its pronunciation is like the sound of oracle bones bursting. This typical phonetic character tells us that the ancient ancestors were doing divination indisputably. The word "Bu" was created in the process. The oracle bone inscriptions unearthed in Yin Ruins, Anyang, Henan Province in 1899 are the earliest characters discovered so far in my country. The signs presented by the tortoise bone cracks are ever-changing, and there will be no one similarity; and the ancestors knew everything and remembered everything, which not only left rich and varied witchcraft content, but also provided future generations with a wealth of information to study ancient times. valuable and reliable information. Tortoiseshell divination has gone through an extremely long period of time. Although the number and volume of the accumulated things that have been condensed and passed down are amazing, the recorded content is all scattered, trivial, mottled and complicated.History is developing, and with every step forward of human beings, the mysterious world becomes more transparent.The ancestors are no longer satisfied with the apocalyptic elements in divination. Their self-awareness is increasingly awakened, and they need to artificially control and operate the entire process: summarize the content of divination in the past, make it abstract, systematize, and symbolize, and rise to a The height of rationality; to make the divination tools less divine, the divination procedures more strictly regulated, and the divination results more testable. Of course, a new set of corresponding new divination characters must be created. History calls for the birth of the third period of man-made witchcraft, and calls for the birth of gods and heroes similar to Fuxi.