In ancient China, folk taboos can be described as numerous. Covers all aspects of life. Therefore, sometimes many people lament that if you really travel back to ancient times, it is really a very terrible thing. The most difficult taboo for contemporary people to accept is the taboo about the aspect of the genus. One of the more typical is this one: men are afraid of chickens, and women are afraid of sheep.
In ancient China, the ancients' understanding of the world was mostly limited to the surrounding ten miles and eight villages. The more intelligent and knowledgeable ancients would relate some of the specious things that happened in the eight villages of Ten Mile and Summarize the colloquialisms of various aspects. Among them, the colloquial saying about the taboo of the genus is also derived from this.
First of all, "men are afraid of chickens". In China, the chicken is a relatively special creature. Because the chicken barks three times, it will be dawn. Therefore, in ancient culture, chickens were gods that could communicate with ghosts and gods, and chicken blood had the effect of warding off evil spirits and exorcising demons. Even sometimes, the chicken is seen as an incarnation of the phoenix, second only to the dragon in the Zodiac. And since it is such a noble "chicken", why is there a saying that "men are afraid of chickens"? This is because the chicken is a creature that gets up very early, and in ancient human society, getting up early and going to bed late is used to describe the most grass-roots laborers, and this work mode is regarded by the ancients as a very boring toil - in the values of the ancients, the life of a scholar who has money and leisure and is well-bred is what makes people feel envious and is worth pursuing. Therefore, the ancients believed that if a man belongs to a chicken, then the fate is likely to be like a chicken, and he needs to get up early to work every day and fall into a state of toil. Therefore, the ancients believed that men were afraid of chickens.
Let's say "women are afraid of sheep.". This traditional concept still prevailed in the folk in the last century, which shows the vitality of this traditional concept. In fact, the tradition of "women are afraid of sheep" did not last long in Chinese history, but it has a history of more than 100 years. It is generally believed that before the late Qing Dynasty, chinese society was not very taboo about sheep.
In the late Qing Dynasty, the Great Qing Dynasty was ruled by Empress Dowager Cixi for half a century. In the past half century, the Qing Dynasty has continuously cut land and paid compensation, and foreign capital has also continued to plunder China's wealth, resulting in a large number of families either going bankrupt, or on the verge of bankruptcy, and even carrying huge debts, and most of the people lived a dark life. Empress Dowager Cixi, on the other hand, belonged to sheep. The people of the Qing Dynasty did not dare to openly express their opposition to Empress Dowager Cixi's assumption of power, so the people of the Qing Dynasty began to "make a fuss" from the zodiac sign of Empress Dowager Cixi. Empress Dowager Cixi belonged to sheep, so the people of the Qing Dynasty put forward a saying: ten sheep and nine are incomplete. In the process of development, this statement gradually departed from the original intention of satirizing Empress Dowager Cixi, and evolved into a woman who belonged to the sheep, so there was a saying that "women are afraid of the sheep".
Of course, in modern times, we should know that whether it is "men are afraid of chickens" or "women are afraid of sheep", there is no scientific basis: if nothing else, take the college entrance examination as an example, among the male students who belong to the chicken, I believe that many of them are admitted to 985 universities, and among the female students who belong to the sheep, there are many who are admitted to double first-class, and in the present and even for a long time in the future, being admitted to a famous school is equal to half of the success of life. Therefore, in this regard alone, we can see the falsehood of the phase taboo.