The legendary origin of the zodiac

Xuanyuan Huangdi is the ancestor of all ethnic groups in the Central Plains of China. After the Yellow Emperor ruled the Central Plains, many things happened. In order to facilitate management, he ordered the historian Cangjie to create characters, and ordered the warlock in charge of astronomy and geography to make a branch chronology, that is, heavenly stems and earthly branches should coordinate and weigh "Jia Zi" every 60 years.

The chronology of heavenly stems and earthly branches is complicated, which is not popular among the people. Therefore, it was suggested to name twelve kinds of animals, which was approved by the Yellow Emperor and Cang Xie was ordered to do. Cang Xie ordered all animals to take part in the election in front of the palace on the first day of the first month. Knowing that his legs and feet are slow, Niu started early on New Year's Eve.

As a result, cows arrived first, followed by tigers, rabbits, dragons, snakes, horses, sheep, monkeys, chickens, dogs, pigs, and cats were the twelfth. The mouse came late, far behind the twelve, and was hopelessly selected, so he slipped into the warehouse of the Yellow Emperor and stole the big red candle in the warehouse.

The big red candle is a gift from the Yellow Emperor to his opponent Chiyou. The middle is empty and filled with gunpowder. As long as the candle is lit, it will explode. The next day, when the Yellow Emperor held a naming ceremony for the zodiac and lit the candle, the guards found gunpowder in the candle from the place where the mouse had bitten.

The mouse inadvertently saved the life of the Yellow Emperor. The Yellow Emperor thought that the mouse was meritorious and chose it as the zodiac, which tied for the first place. The other animals retreated in turn, and the cat was eliminated. So up to now, cats still hate mice and are their sworn enemies.

Extended data

The origin of the zodiac is related to animal worship. According to the Qin bamboo slips unearthed in Yunmeng Shuihudi, Hubei Province and Fangmatan, Tianshui, Gansu Province, there was a relatively complete zodiac system in the pre-Qin period. The earliest handed down document that recorded the same Chinese zodiac as the modern one was Lun Heng written by Wang Chong in the Eastern Han Dynasty.

The zodiac is an intuitive representation of the twelve earthly branches, namely, Zi (mouse), Ugly (ox), Yin (tiger), Mao (rabbit), Chen (dragon), Si (snake), Wu (horse), Wei (sheep), Shen (monkey), You (chicken) and Xu (chicken).

It is manifested in marriage, life, and annual luck. Each zodiac has rich legends, forming a conceptual interpretation system and becoming an image philosophy in folk culture, such as the zodiac in marriage, the blessing in temple fairs, the animal year and so on. In modern times, more people regard the zodiac as the mascot of the Spring Festival and become a symbol of entertainment and cultural activities.

As a long-standing symbol of folk culture, the zodiac has left a lot of poems, Spring Festival couplets, paintings, calligraphy and paintings and folk arts and crafts that depict the image and symbolic meaning of the zodiac. Apart from China, many countries in the world issue stamps of the zodiac during the Spring Festival to express their wishes for the New Year in China.

believe

Zodiac belief is an imaginative belief system formed by the combination of China's traditional religious philosophy and mathematical culture, supplemented by the association of Zodiac animal temperament, which further affects people's ideas and behaviors. The core is that the zodiac plays a decisive role in the people and things it marks.

According to this logic, the operation of human society has nothing to do with any other events, but it naturally appears because of the human zodiac attribute, which obviously cannot stand verification. However, as a belief itself, it does not need logical proof, but is directly taken for granted. Therefore, the belief in the zodiac still has a market among contemporary people, and it is constantly derived.

References:

Zodiac killer. Baidu baike