Chapter 4 Chapter 2 The Naturalization of Man

During the period of fishing and hunting economy, people had a particularly close relationship with animals, ranging from tigers, leopards, bears, and pipi to small fowls, birds, fish, and insects. They were the source of life for clan members, and their meat was edible. Fur and fur can cover the body to keep out the cold. Even after entering farming, cattle, horses and other livestock are still closely related to people.People cannot do without animals, are familiar with animals, and then worship and pray to animals. The final purpose is to conquer animals, and animals have mystery from this.It recorded many weird animal gods.Some are good for people, while others are very harmful.Such as:

There is a beast, shaped like a pig, with teeth, named Dangkang, and its cry seems to be calling itself.Where Dangkang is found, there will be a bumper harvest. (See "Eastern Four Classics") This may be the mystification of wild boar.Wild boar is an important hunting object for hunters.If a wild boar can be hunted, of course it means a bumper harvest in hunting, and it is associated with a bumper harvest in agriculture. The 蠃 (luo naked) fish has a fish body, bird wings, and the sound of a mandarin duck. Seeing this kind of fish will definitely cause a big flood. (See "Four Classics of the West")

Contrary to the previous example, this belongs to the evil god among the animal gods, symbolizing bad luck and disaster.Strictly speaking, these can only be regarded as the outline of animal myths, without a complete storyline.Some scholars researched that there were pictures at first, but the pictures were lost, and the text handed down is only the description of those pictures, so it is very brief. It is not without reason to say that animals are so miraculous.There are indeed many animals in life that are beneficial to people, such as frogs, poultry, and livestock; and the appearance of locusts means a famine; before an earthquake, some animals will have various abnormal phenomena; Snake skin can be used as medicine.These are the realistic basis for producing animal myths.However, many of these myths do not have the nature of totems, but only show how much the primitive people longed for the help of animals, and at the same time hoped to overcome the disasters caused by animals.If it is said that the brevity of the book prevents us from knowing the full picture of the original mythology, especially the authentic animal totem mythology, which can be known but not available, but it can be compensated for by ethnic minorities.

The Ewenki people living in the northeastern border of our country call themselves "people living in the mountains and forests". They are good at hunting and reindeer, and there are still remnants of bear totem worship.After they hunted a bear, they had a series of worship rituals and taboos. First, they wrapped the bear's head, bones, and internal organs with birch sticks or hay, hung them on the tree, and carried out wind burial. Making a mourning gesture means mourning the ancestors and seeking forgiveness from the bear totem. Why do Ewenki people regard bears as their ancestors? Their myths and legends explain it like this:

When a hunter went hunting in the mountains, he was suddenly caught by a female bear.The mother bear took him into the cave and forced the hunter to marry her.The hunter was forced to live with the female bear in the cave for several years until they gave birth to a cub.Later the hunter took the opportunity to escape from the cave.When the mother bear found that the hunter had escaped, she carried her cub to chase the hunter.When chasing to the river, the hunter had already fled on a wooden raft.The mother bear was very annoyed by this, so she tore the cub in two on the spot, threw one half to the hunter, and kept the other half with her.Those who stayed with them became the later bears, and those who were thrown to the hunters became the later Evenkis.

This is of course absurd, how can a bear turn into a human, this is the reflection of the totem concept of their ancient ancestors. The Oroqen and the Ewenki are of the same origin, "originally two close branches of an ancient tribe", so the two ethnic groups have exactly the same myth about the ancestor of the bear. The Oroqen also has a series of complex bear hunting and sacrifice ceremonies. One of its purposes is to fear that the bears they believe to be spiritual will retaliate against the hunters and those who eat the bear meat.During the wind burial, there is also a song about wind burial. The content of the lyrics contains the following meaning: it is not that we killed you, but that you died when your lifespan was up.They call the male bear grandfather and uncle, and the female bear grandmother.

The bear ancestor myths of Ewenki and Oroqen are relatively simple animal totem myths, and have not been mixed with other legends of later generations.Such myths are not uncommon among the ethnic minorities in the Southwest.According to the legend of the Nu people, their ancestors were born from the mating of snakes and bees, and the Tibetans say that humans were born after mating of monkeys and rock demons.The animals worshiped by the Yi people include tigers, deer, monkeys, buffaloes, sheep, rock sheep, roe deer, bears, rats, eagles, white chickens, green turtledoves and so on.The Kemu people of Mengna in Xishuangbanna, until the early 1980s, still kept a complete totem system in a rather primitive form.The Kemu people do not catch or eat the totem animals they believe in, and they even consider it disrespectful to touch them.The totem myth of the Little Sparrow Clan says:

There was a man guarding the wadi.When the millet is ripe, all kinds of birds come to eat it.All day long, he knocked on the bamboo tube and yelled to drive away the birds.One day at noon, the weather was sultry, so he used a knife to peel cucumbers and eat them.While delivering cucumbers to his mouth with the edge of a knife, suddenly a group of small sparrows came to eat the millet. He hurriedly yelled loudly to chase them away, the knife cut his mouth open, and he died.Since then, Little Bird has become the surname of the descendants of this family. In addition, some people call themselves the Tiger Clan because the tiger ate their son, and some call themselves the Chicken Clan because their wife died of illness after eating chicken... The Kemu people try to use this kinship relationship to pray that the totem will no longer harm people and protect people.This kind of myth and legend will not disappear for a long time after the decline of the totem system, and it has an extremely important reference value for the scientific understanding of later generations.