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In Chinese mythology, the sun god is not very famous, and the legend about the sun is not very beautiful. Two of the most famous are:
One is to praise the father day by day.
This story is from the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Overseas North Longitude".
Father Quao chased the sun, from sunrise to sunset, and when he felt thirsty, he went to the Yellow River, the Wei River, to drink water. The river was not enough, so he went to the northern lake to drink water, and before he could reach the halfway point, he died of thirst.
After his father's death, his cane turned into a peach forest.
It's a very graphic scene.
In the vast wilderness, a giant is running.
The road stretched ahead, the river flowed to his left and right, and the sky was vast and cloudless. The sun shone on him, and the sweat cascaded down like a waterfall.
Why is he running?
What about catching up with the sun? Or knowing that he can't catch up with the sun, what else is he going to run? No one knows.
The other is the post-shooting sun.
A long time ago, the 10 suns in the sky took turns on duty, one a day, bringing light and warmth to the human world.
However, they are also very willful, and once they all ran out to play, and the human beings fell into bad luck, the mountains and rocks melted, the rivers dried up, the crops withered, and the people did not have a good life.
At this time, a hero named Houyi came out, who possessed innate divine power and superb archery skills, shooting down the sun in the sky one by one, leaving only one.
The suns were shot and burst, turning into three-legged crows that fell.
Finally, people's lives returned to their former calm.
If this scene is made into a movie, it must be a blockbuster with full special effects. Houyi also fixed the hero image in people's minds because of this story.
In both stories, the Sun plays the villain role of a hurt person, which is very different from the Sun as we know it.
Sunlight, air and water are the three elements of the growth of all things and the source of life. The energy we use every day comes from the sun.
So, in the legend, why is the sun so bad?
To understand this question, we cannot regard legends as mere legends, but as clues to understand the development of history.
We all know that. China's written history began with the Zhou Dynasty, and many people believe that the historical evidence for the history of the Shang and Xia dynasties is insufficient.
However, the Zhou Dynasty certainly could not appear out of thin air, and it was bound to go through a primitive tribal and tribal alliance stage.
Through the myths and legends of ancient times, we may be able to glimpse some of the scenes at that time.
The two stories of Father Kwa's day by day and post-shooting day, as well as the mention of hot drought, show that this land has experienced a warm climate that lasted for a long time.
In the 4.6 billion years of Earth's history, the climate has never stopped changing, and has been moving between cold and warm, dry and wet, and every tens of thousands of years or so, it will experience a cycle of warm periods and ice ages.
Scientists can obtain a lot of climate information through scientific means in places such as tree wheels, ice cores, rock cores, and caves.
In the daily story of Father Kwa, it is mentioned that Father Kwa once went to the Yellow River and the Wei River to drink water.
Perhaps, we can understand that a tribe called Kwapa, in the face of a protracted drought, once managed to fetch water from the Yellow River and the Wei River, and persisted for a long time, although this tribe eventually disappeared, but the facilities and spirit they left behind inspired the next tribe and people to continue to move forward.
The period in which Hou Yi was located was the time of Emperor Yao's reign.
The legend of the shooting sun, we can also understand the story of Houyi leading people to fight against the heat.
When the ten suns were in the air, all kinds of fierce beasts were also stirring up evil.
Hou Yi killed the monsters such as Chisel Teeth, Nine Babies, Gale, Nine Days, and Snake Repair, captured fengfeng, and brought peace to the human world.
These legends may actually have been waged during Yao's reign, after all, he was the first of the three generations of Yao, Shun, and Yu, which was the era when the tribal alliance began.
Houyi's heroic ending is not very good, according to legend, his wife Chang'e took the elixir given to Houyi by the Queen Mother of the West and flew into the Moon Palace, and he himself was also killed by his own apprentice Feng Meng.
This ending can be seen as the decline of the dominance of a tribal leader.
Reality is often less rosy, and stories often end in a happy ending.