Owl is often a symbol of bad luck in modern times, but at the dawn of human civilization, she is the most sacred existence with the goddess. Owls crouched beside Inanna, Sumer's "Goddess of Heaven", and stood on the shoulders of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, while Indian white owls carried their lucky goddesses.
China worshiped owls in Yangshao culture more than 6,000 years ago, and exquisite ceramic pans were unearthed in Yangshao cultural site in Shaanxi. Ding's shape is charming and lifelike.
In Shang dynasty, the worship of owls by Chinese ancestors reached its extreme. All kinds of owl statues made of bronze, jade or pottery emerge in endlessly in ancient tombs of Shang Dynasty, sometimes in the form of three-dimensional owls, and sometimes in the form of various owls. This deep-rooted worship even made the Yin people sing the ode of "the mysterious bird of fate, born in business and lush land", convinced that their ancestors were owls from the sky. Thus, a thousand years later, Sima Qian wrote in Historical Records Yin Benji: "Zhu Di, the mother of Zhu Di, has a daughter, the daughter of Yi, who is the second princess. In a threesome bath, I saw a bird drop its egg, and Judy took it and swallowed it because it was pregnant. "
Perhaps the worship of owls is related to their appearance and living habits. In ancient myths and legends, wings, as a symbol of flying, are often used to express the divinity of God-the man with wings behind him is God. "Bao Puzi" records that "ancient immortals, or born with wings, changed to fly." Owls, as a few birds with eyes in front, are most similar to this kind of portrait with wings behind it.
Owls are mostly nocturnal carnivores, belonging to nocturnal raptors. As fierce hunters, owls are usually regarded as a symbol of victory in war. In ancient Greece, the owl symbolized Athena as Sivir. Yin people also believed that the national treasure and the good wife came from the funerary objects of invincible Sivir, which was used to show the invincible achievements of the good wife.
Owls, as a habit of not sleeping during the day and coming out at night, are often associated with the night and the moon. For example, the symbol of Minerva, the Roman moon god, is the owl. At the same time, the moon is opposite to the sun and is a symbol of women, so the owl is generally a symbol of the goddess.
On the other hand, night is usually associated with death and unknown dangers, so owls are often associated with death and soul, either as protectors or guides. Yin people think that owls are night protectors, and owls will travel at night with the souls of their ancestors. At the end of Qin dynasty and the beginning of Han dynasty, owl pottery was often used in town tombs. Ancient Egypt also protected the souls of the dead by depicting owls on sarcophagus.
Owl, as a goddess, spent thousands of years in people's worship, and then the dynasty was overthrown and civilizations alternated. "Mu Yang, Tan Cheren ... cool the king of Wu, slash big business." The chaos of Konoha ruined the Shang Dynasty, and also started the journey of owl falling into the sky in the history of China.
"Owl, if you take my son, you won't ruin my room." In The Book of Songs, Zhou described owls as evil birds stealing young birds and destroying nests, which was also the earliest bad comment on owls in the history of China. Zhou people don't like owls. In addition to slandering the former dynasty to maintain its own legitimacy, it may also include fear and anxiety. Because the Shang Dynasty was a dynasty where the living sacrificed, and Zhou's duty was to provide human sacrifices. Under such complicated emotions and motives, since the middle and late Western Zhou Dynasty, the works of art with the theme of owls have decreased sharply, and the owl patterns on owl-shaped bronzes have basically disappeared. The sanctity of owls has since been erased from the history of China.
If Zhou pulled the owl down from the altar, then Han opened a high-speed passage to hell for the owl. According to Records of Sacrifice to the Suburb in Hanshu, "the ancient emperor often rested on the shrine in spring, while the yellow emperor broke the mirror with an owl", and the owl became the emperor's sacrifice. According to Ruchun's comments, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty cooked soup for a few officials on May 5th. Eat it, because the evil bird. "Why did the emperor give a banquet with owls? The answer is "my heart aches, so that all officials can use it." "
Zhou people hated owls, and Han even wanted to destroy owls. This is because in the history of China, besides the Shang Dynasty, there was an owl, which was the most hated owl in Korea. "Historical Records of Qin Benji" records that "women weave, birds lay eggs, women swallow and have children". Daqin originated from an owl like Yin Shang, but Zhu Di, who swallowed a bird's egg, became a woman.
Under the hatred of Korea's "wanting to destroy its kind", the owl was crowned with the crime of being unable to turn over again. Xu Shen wrote in Shuo Wen Jie Zi: "The owl eats the mother, and the bird is unfilial. In just seven words, owls have been unable to be rehabilitated in Confucian society since the Eastern Han Dynasty. Later, some scholars supplemented and improved the "mother-eating" behavior of owls. For example, Cao Zhi once said in "On Bad Birds" that "owls can fly after eating their mother's good clothes"; In the Qing dynasty, some people even claimed to have seen owls "eat their mothers" with their own eyes. "The mother knows that she can't escape, but she lies on her back with her wings, letting everyone peck, eat and look at her mouth." I wonder what the owl would think if he could read this vivid description of Dunzhai Bebiri.
But the official slander only turned the owl into a bad bird, and the anecdotes circulated by the people will turn the owl into a terrible evil ghost.
Guo Pu in the Eastern Jin Dynasty recorded in the "Xuanzhongji" that "birds fly at night and hide by day to hide ghosts and gods. Clothing hair is a bird, and hair removal is a woman. A fairy, a night girl, a Crookedstar, an invisible man. Birds have no children and like to raise human children, thinking that they are children. Nowadays, children's clothes don't want to be exposed at night, so they love to use blood to point clothes, that is, to take care of children. The dead are called ghost birds, and there are many in Jingzhou. Yesterday, a man in Zhang Yu saw six or seven women wearing Tanaka, but they didn't know it was a bird. They crawled to get the sweater, took it and hid it, and then went to find the bird. Birds go to sweaters and clothes fly away. One bird can't go alone, one man is a woman. Give birth to three girls. Her mother's maid asked her father that she knew the clothes were under Jimmy, so she took them and flew away. Then I greeted my three daughters with clothes, and the clothes of my three daughters also flew away. This is called a ghost car. "
Literally, this record describes a ghost bird stolen from a child, but careful analysis will reveal that it contains a lot of malicious information. First of all, the bird's nickname "Tiannv" actually refers to the ancestors of Qin people. There are two evidences: first, according to historical records, the female disciple who swallowed eggs and laid eggs was "the descendant of Emperor Zhuan Xu", and Zhuan Xu, one of the five northern emperors, was often misrepresented as the daughter of Emperor Zhuan Xu in the circulated stories; Second, the story of stealing clothes in the second half of the story is very similar to that of the folk cowherd and weaver girl, and the female correction is one of the prototypes of the weaver girl.
Secondly, the bird's bird shape is an owl. In the Tang Dynasty's "Ling Biao Ji", it was recorded that "storks are storks ... they can't see anything in the daytime, flying mosquitoes at night are also ghost cars ... also known as nocturnal women and babies, so they can't show the stars in the baby's clothes for fear of their precious ears". It can even be speculated that birds have added the characteristics of stealing children, which may be inspired by the description of owls stealing chicks in the Wind of Zhou People.
Thus, in folklore, the girl in the sky becomes a monster that can become an owl, and the child is no longer "born by swallowing the egg of a mysterious bird", but stolen from someone else's home-a bird is born. However, the cuckoo at this time can only be regarded as a monster at most, far from evil spirits. There is one last step, so that the owl, the goddess and the god of war behind her will completely fall.
This last step was recorded in Youyang Miscellanies in the Tang Dynasty, which said, "Go at night, visit the goddess and catch the stars." . The night flies, the day is hidden like a ghost, ... or the words of the dead are transformed. "After the producer died, it is said that this bird or owl has completely turned into a ghost. If we dig deeper, we will find that there is more malice behind this rumor, because the woman who slept with the owl died in childbirth.
After thousands of years of official slander and folk rumors, owl, chrysanthemum butterfly, Fu Hao and Fu Xiu finally merged together to create a ghost bird. "The ancient bird ... the ancients said that this bird was transformed by the mother, and its yin was a demon, so it had various names." "This kind of bird is pure female and has no male, and it flies in the evening of July and August, which is particularly harmful to others." Li Shizhen in Ming Dynasty concluded in Compendium of Materia Medica. The patron saint of the Yin people and the ancestors of the Qin people eventually became monsters that were harmful to others, and the god bird descended from the Emperor of Heaven also became a spectre transformed by the labor force, and even crossed the ocean to become a famous monster in Japan.
The star of Qiming finally fell.