When the first people of mankind exerted their fantasy ability to tell the origin story of all things in the universe and human beings themselves, the creation myth was born in various tribes and ethnic groups, which in the eyes of many scholars is the source of philosophical thinking. The creation myth can not only reflect the psychological consciousness and cultural concepts of the nation, but also reflect the distinct aesthetic orientation and national spirit.
On December 20, 2021, the 2021 annual forum of the Chinese Creation Myth Research Project "Creation Myth and The Exploration of the Source of Chinese Civilization" was held in the Shanghai Social Science Hall.
Forum scene The pictures in this article are all pictures of the surging news reporter Zou Jiawen
"Heaven and earth are yellow, the universe is flooded"
Perhaps the Chinese creation myths that most people imagine are stories with romanticism such as Pangu Kaitian, Nuwa Patching Heaven, and Quao's Father Chasing the Sun, but standing in the field of mythological research, scholars should effectively combine mythology and archaeology and other fields, and use the spirit of scientific research to present the chain of Chinese culture in as much detail as possible.
"Heaven and earth Xuanhuang, cosmic flood", Ye Shuxian shared in the mythological research sharing at the forum, starting from the eight characters of the "Thousand Character Text".
Ye Shuxian is the chief expert of the Institute of Mythology of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and for more than a decade, he and his team have gone deep into more than 50 ethnic groups and studied Chinese mythology through fieldwork. "The Chinese mythological stories that our team studied are not ready-made stories, but content that is difficult to understand without copywriting research and archaeological excavations. So the myths we study are arduous scientific explorations and liberal arts innovations. At the site of these archaeological excavations, Ye Shuxian and his team tried to use mythological research to explain what the tomb saw and "activate" the culture it contained.
At the forum, Ye Shuxian shared that in the tomb of the lower cultural giant in Zhenyuan Changshan at the junction of Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia, the staff excavated the bones of a giant dating back to 4800 years ago, which was preserved from head to toe, and the giant's body was 2.1 meters in size, and the funerary items included 72 earth-yellow clay pots at his feet, as well as the dark jade on the top of his head. Ye Shuxian explained that the first meaning of Xuan is black, the second meaning refers to change, and the word that constitutes a perfect match with it is "yellow". The fixed combination of Xuan and Huang has become a binary color coding model of the Chinese version of the mythological cosmology, such as "Yellow Emperor Xuanyu" in the "Classic of Mountains and Seas" and "Dragon's Blood Xuanhuang" in "Zhou Yi".
Therefore, in the face of the giants in the lower culture of Changshan Mountain, Ye Shuxian explained it with the Xuanhuang binary color coding model - the ancients hoped that the soul of the deceased would ascend to heaven in the direction of the sun, so Xuanyu was placed on the top of the head, and the soles of the feet were placed on the pottery stove. "I noticed that xuanyu had no traces of cutting and chiseling, it was completely new, indicating that it was used to accompany the burial of the deceased; the pottery stove did not have any smoke and fire, and it was also a meditative vessel, specially made for burial. The heavens are dark, the earth is yellow, isn't this exactly the heavens and the earth? Ye Shuxian explained that this is the dual activation of mythology on cultural relics and documents.
Topaz and Xuan jade displayed by Ye Shuxian
The study of the Chinese creation myth entered the world of cultural relics before the oracle bone, and finally opened the door to explore the origin of Chinese thought. "Nowadays we can say that Xuan is the first key word that has been greatly ignored by the history of Chinese culture, the history of Chinese thought and the history of Chinese art for more than a hundred years." At the end of 2020, Ye Shuxian edited the "Xuanyu Era", which is dedicated to the study of the foundational significance of the origin of the central plains jade culture in the Yangshao period to the formation of the country.
It is worth mentioning that the ink fragrance of the book has not yet dissipated, in January 2021, When Ye Shuxian browsed the cultural relics collected by the Xianyang Museum on the Internet, he was pleasantly surprised to find a number of cultural relics similar to the jade excavated from the Yangshao Cultural Tomb in the western slope of Lingbao, Henan in the early 21st century, marked as "stone axe". Ye Shuxian entrusted his student Wang Wei to visit the Xianyang Museum several times, and finally verified that it was made of dark green snake-patterned stone jade, and "examined the body" of the Xuan jade that had been sleeping in the warehouse for 62 years.
More than 50 ethnic groups, integrated 16 volumes of 15 million words of "creation myth"
In addition, the first phase of the "Chinese Creation Myth Research Project Series" was released at the meeting, the first phase launched 16 volumes, including 6 research monographs, 8 mythological literature compilations (including text data and image data, such as "Chinese Creation Myth Character Image Genealogy") and 2 field investigation reports ("Chinese Yu Traces" and "Dynamic Inheritance of Pangu Culture", etc.), with a total word count of about 15 million words, and the follow-up results will be published in 2022.
The results of the first phase of the "Chinese Creation Myth Research Project Series"
At the end of 2017, the Propaganda Department of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and the Shanghai Municipal Federation of Social Sciences launched the "Chinese Creation Myth Research Project", which is a major cultural brand construction project in Shanghai, with a huge project. The "Chinese Creation Myth Research Project" has achieved fruitful results, through the in-depth excavation, collation and exploration of more than 50 ethnic creation myths in China, and completed the integration of large-scale thematic literature and materials, showing the rich diversity and overall style of China's creation myth resources to the world for the first time.
Among them, the Institute of Mythology of Shanghai Jiao Tong University undertook the sub-project of the series of books "Chinese Creation Myth Archaeology Topic : Yucheng China", reconstructing the far-reaching historical main vein before the production of oracle bone Chinese characters, and revealing the important role of jade culture genes in the birth of Chinese civilized countries in the grand vision of the new material evidence chain of "Ten Thousand Years of China".
In addition, "Selected Chinese Creation Myths" for the first time gathered and displayed the creation myth stories of more than 50 ethnic minorities in China, which brought surprises to global experts in literature, history and philosophy; "Selected Notes on Chinese Creation Myths" was co-edited by Professor Wang Xianzhao and Professor Wang Jing of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, showing the rich diversity of Chinese multi-ethnic creation myths to the world in the scale of 5 12 books, and becoming an example of the basic construction of academic special research in the era of big data; Chinese Creation Myth Character Image Genealogy" is the first large-scale collection and collation of relevant image data since ancient times, providing a treasure trove of local mythological image resources for the current "reading era" of new media and self-media; The team of Bi Xuling, professor of the Shanghai Academy of Sciences, co-authored the "Traces of Chinese Yu - Field Investigation Report on the Creation Myth of Chinese Cangyu", which is a typical practice of successfully combining anthropology and fieldwork, and recounts mythological texts with living cultural samples of folk surveys. It provides new research materials for the study of future mythology; the "Research on Chinese Creation Myths and Cultural and Creative Industries" written by the team led by Professor Huang Jingchun of Shanghai University is directly oriented to the needs of the actual social and economic transformation, and through the examples of tourism and cultural and creative industry development in various places, it shows how the mythological heritage of Pangu Dashen and Yanhuang Ancestors can benefit today's local economic development. According to the forum, the compilation and launch of this set of books vividly interprets the characteristics of China's 5,000-year-old civilization of "pluralism, inclusiveness and continuous", which will provide valuable local knowledge resources and IP symbols for the future cultural and creative industries, and will also provide an interdisciplinary successful research case for the academic innovation of Chinese liberal arts.