This is the story of the famous Ten-Day Gun, which is recorded in many ancient books. There is only one sun in the sky, and crows can't live in it. Crows have only two feet, and even the most capable people can't shoot the sun in the sky. Every link in this story is ridiculous and unreasonable. It is unreasonable, so it needs to be explained. What made the ancients fabricate such an absurd story?
Generally speaking, this story is attributed to the unreasonable imagination of ancient people who knew little about the catastrophe of nature. In my opinion, any story with a long history, no matter how absurd, is the product of a reasonable historical and cultural movement, and absurd stories have profound cultural connotations. The purpose of explanation is not to attribute these stories to the unreasonable imagination of the ancients, but to reveal the cultural mechanism that prompted the formation of these stories.
One or ten days
The myth of shooting for ten days can be analyzed into three links, namely, the ten days coming out side by side, and the three legs are in a tripartite confrontation, shooting at the sun. The latter two links all come from the first link: on the tenth day, three feet and feet will live in it, and on the tenth day, they will shoot the sun. Therefore, "10" is the key to this myth. To sort out this myth, we have to start with the speech "10".
"Ten days" is a common motif in China's mythology. Obviously, there is only one sun above us, and the saying "ten days" is too strange. Therefore, many intelligent people have been attracted since ancient times to try to uncover the origin of this statement.
Nowadays, the "scientific" explanation of the myth of "decameron" is very popular. According to this explanation, the ancients said "ten days" because they had indeed seen the astronomical phenomena of "ten days coming out together". However, the phenomenon of ten days in unison is not that there are ten real suns in the sky, but a peculiar atmospheric optical phenomenon caused by special atmospheric conditions, which is called "magic sun" in meteorology. Some scholars have even calculated the weather conditions and opportunities for this phenomenon (Note: Modern Interpretation of Weird Records in Ancient Books: Exploring the Victory of China's Traditional Science and Technology Culture, edited by Bo, Science Press, 1992. )。 Moreover, some local reports about this phenomenon have also appeared in newspapers.
This explanation is based on "scientific" calculation and observation, which seems quite reasonable, but actually can't stand scrutiny. The researchers themselves admit that the phenomenon of "magic day" can't be seen anywhere and at any time. It often occurs near the North and South Poles, and occasionally it can be seen in high latitudes in northern China. Moreover, when the "magic day" phenomenon occurs, there are not necessarily ten "holidays", and only under the most ideal conditions will there be a "ten-day" astronomical phenomenon. According to this explanation, we should not only have the myth of "ten days", but also have the myth of "two days", "four days" or other numbers of suns. However, why is there only "the tenth" in the myth? It can be seen that this explanation actually overturns its own explanation when it thought it had found the answer to decameron's myth.
More importantly, this explanation completely misunderstood the essence of myth. Myth is a sacred and true discourse. Myth can be deeply believed by members of a nation, passed down from generation to generation, and religiously reappeared by various solemn means in sacred religions and ceremonies because myth is a grand narrative of a nation, which preserves the collective memory of the whole nation and is an epic of a nation. In the eyes of the ancients, it was the true history of their ancestors. Only things with historical significance, only those cultural systems that people think are related to the survival of the whole nation, only those historical events that have strongly influenced the fate of the whole nation, only those sages who have profoundly shaped the spiritual world of the whole nation, and only those gods or demons who decided the rise and fall of this world in the eyes of the ancients can be praised by a nation from generation to generation and deeply rooted in the collective memory of the nation. In other words, it may become a myth. Not everything can be handed down through mythical memories, even extraordinary natural and man-made anecdotes, even if they once attracted people's attention, surprise and even panic, such as strange astronomical phenomena that appeared for several days in a row. Even if this kind of celestial phenomenon really once entered the vision of our ancestors, because of its extremely small frequency and short duration, and without any natural or political consequences, it can only arouse the surprise and discussion of a limited number of witnesses, and will not become the same topic of the whole group or even the nation. The whispers of several people will soon be calm, but will remain in the memories of several people, and will be completely forgotten with their death, leaving no trace on history, culture, mythology and national memory.
Myth is an ancient form of thought. As an ideology, it embodies the ancestors' understanding of the world. Like their "civilized" descendants, the ancestors' understanding of the world was not a fiction and fantasy that came out of thin air, nor a passive or objective reflection of the world, but was determined by their social existence and system. The system in which man lives not only determines how he can do nothing, but also determines his vision and attitude towards the world, so it also determines what style or "spectacle" the world presents in his vision. That is to say, we can't just attribute the mythological wonders such as "decameron" to some specious natural wonders, nor can we attribute them to the imagination or illusion of the ancients, but we should look for opportunities for their formation in the human cultural system.