Unmasking AIT

[Husky]

Post 4/ China part 2, and Ghana



c. "Yu the Great defeats Xianglui 9 headed serpent who works for Gong Gong"



This is the example that the opening excerpt on wacky gave for the Chinese case of the allegedly PIE allegedly "chaoskampf".



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yu_the_Great



says that he's remembered for dredging and irrigation. I.e. stopped floods. Could be de-mythicisation of his fight with the mult-headed serpent. But the page still admits:

Yu was supposed to have killed Gong Gong's minister Xiangliu, a nine-headed snake monster.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangliu

Xiangliu (Chinese: 相柳; pinyin: Xiāngliǔ) or Xiangyou is a nine-headed snake monster encountered in Chinese mythology. According to the Shan Hai Jing, Xiangliu was a minister of Gong Gong. Later Xiangliu was killed by Yu the Great. An oral version of the Xiangliu myth was collected as late from Sichuan as late as 1983, in which Xiangliu is depicted as a nine-headed dragon, responsible for floods and other harm.



A minister of the snake-like water deity Gong Gong, Xiangliu devastated the ecology everywhere he went, leaving nothing but gullies and marshes, devoid of animal life. Eventually, Xiangliu was killed by Yu the Great whose other labors included ending the Great Flood (China) (or else he was killed, according to one modern version, by Nüwa, after being defeated by Zhurong), but so poisonously virulent was the blood of Xiangliu that the soil which it soaked could no longer grow grains. [1]

About that last line: do they mean like the blood from multi-snake-headed Medusa? Or the much closer case of the blood from snakey Korean giant magical snake of Gimnyeong Sagul/Serpent Cave in Jeju, Korea?

OR it's just a common conclusion:

Many snakes are poisonous. Next to the weather/water control they're thought to exercise by a myriad ancient communities on the planet, it's not surprising that the blood that results from their severed heads is assumed to be poisonous as well and that this will therefore poison the land into barrenness or worse.

Diverse people seemed to often enough come to those very conclusions - independently, without the need to be instructed by PIE-ism.



en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gong_Gong

Gong Gong

Gong Gong (Chinese: 共工; pinyin: Gònggōng), also known as Kanghui, is a Chinese water god or sea monster who is often depicted in Chinese mythology, folktales, and religious stories as having red hair and the tail of a serpent (or dragon).[1] He is often seen as destructive and is blamed for various cosmic catastrophes. In all accounts, Gonggong ends up being killed or sent into exile, usually after losing a struggle with another major deity.





In Literature

Gonggong is known from the late Warring States period (before 221 BCE). Gong Gong appears in the ancient "Heavenly Questions" (Tianwen) poem of the Chu Ci, where he is blamed for knocking the earth's axis off center, causing it to tilt to the southeast and the sky to tilt to the northwest.[2] This axial tilt is used to explain why the rivers of China generally flow to the southeast, especially the Yangzi River and the Yellow River, and why the sun, moon, and stars move towards the northwest. Literature from the Han dynasty becomes much more detailed regarding Gonggong.



Other stories

The great floods are said to be the responsibility of Gonggong and his associate Xiang Yao (alternately, Xiangliu Chinese: 相繇), who has nine heads and the body of a snake.

[color="#800080"](A duo to blame)[/color]



In Chinese mythology, Gong Gong was ashamed that he lost the fight with Zhu Rong, the Chinese god of fire, to claim the throne of Heaven. In a fit of rage he smashed his head against Buzhou Mountain (不周山), a pillar holding up the sky, greatly damaging it and causing the sky to tilt towards the northwest and the earth to shift to the southeast, which caused great floods and suffering.



The goddess Nüwa (女媧) cut off the legs of the giant turtle Ao and used them in place of the fallen pillar, ending the floods and suffering; she was, however, unable to fully correct the tilted sky and earth and alter their effects on the sun, moon, stars, and rivers in China.



"Gong Gong" is sometimes translated as Minister of Works (e.g., in the first chapters of the Shangshu). In this attempt at demythologization, he joins other dubious "ministers", such as Long the Dragon.

At least this one is cosmic (and rather interesting for several points). But, it's not one that PIE is making claims on - PIE invoked Yu vs Xiangliu. So can leave GongGong. Plus I've seen the similar notions in a lot of populations (incl. outside the reach of IE. Some cosmic creature - swimming in the sea of space/space sea creature - knocking the world off kilter and causing environmental disasters is a very common conclusion.)

On a less drastic scale, I recall children's bedtime story books having lots of stories from China wherein 'dragons' caused cosmic problems (like swallowing = eclipsing the sun or moon etc and the stars in the night sky*) and thereby causing floods (since the moon controls the tides anyway, the blame for droughts will be directly attributed to such swallowing actions).

Don't know why populations aren't allowed to see their own native creatures (e.g. Chinese Longs) forming in the sky and therewith causing environmental disasters, and have to instead bow down to alien alleged IE populations and thank them for general imagination.



* You know, the way Rahu and Ketu eclipsed Sun, moon, stars. Common enough view, nothing PIE about this either, BTW: comets/eclipses in Africa have been explained the same way (along with fears common to various populations that, after an eclipses or upon a meteor shower etc, possibly-cataclyptic disasters will ensue, the King will suddenly die/the guard will change. Generally seen as prophesying "great change".)





d. China's (Li Ji the) Serpent Slayer [color="#0000FF"]AND a Ghanan example from Africa[/color]

(Li Ji's example is famous. Found even in feminist anthologies of fairy tales from around the world. :cough: Serpent Slayer and Other Stories :cough



Note the following also showcases an African example of a Snake God



colorq.org/articles/article.aspx?d=lore&x=snake

Soninke and Chinese legends of the Slayer of the Snake God

The Chinese recorded the legend Li Ji Slays The Snake in Sou Shen Ji, a collection of supernatural tales. Li Ji was said to have lived in the Warring States era (475-221 BCE).1 She was a teenage girl who lived in a part of China where people sacrificed a twelve-to-thirteen year old girl yearly to a snake god. The priests believed that the meal of human flesh would avert the wrath of the giant snake, which lived in a cave and came out to plague the people. One year, Li Ji volunteered to be the sacrifice against the will of her parents. But unknown to any, she went to the lair of the snake, taking some fragrant rice and a hunting dog with her. She placed the rice outside the snake's lair, and then hid herself. [color="#0000FF"]The snake came out, attracted by the fragrant smell of rice.[/color] Its eyes were as big as saucers, but Li Ji was not afraid and set the hound on it. While the snake was busy defending itself from the dog, Li Ji attacked it from behind, hacking at it with her sword until it died. She went into the cave and found the remains of the previous nine sacrificial victims. The snake was no god at all, but a mere brute which devoured humans. The king of the land heard of Li Ji's courage and invited her to become his queen.2



The Soninke of West Africa also tell a story about single individual defying tradition and public opinion to stand up to a snake god. In the West African legend, the snake was Bida, a god of the ancient [color="#FF0000"]Ghana[/color] Empire. It demanded an annual offering of one maiden in exchange for the prosperity of the wealthy kingdom. One year the maiden Sia (or Siya) was chosen to be the sacrifice. Her betrothed husband Mamadou (Amadou or Maadi in some other tellings of the story), an army officer, fought the snake to save her. The snake had [color="#FF0000"]hydra-like properties of regenerating its severed heads[/color] but the officer eventually defeated the deity. [color="#FF0000"]The Ghana Empire, bereft of its guardian deity, declined soon after.[/color]3



The superficial similarities between the Chinese and Soninke stories are quite clear, but there are also fundamental differences:



•The Soninke snake was an actual god; the Chinese one was just an animal.

•The Soninke tale was set at the time of the decline of the Ghana Empire, around the 11th century.4 The Chinese one was set more than a thousand years earlier.

•The Chinese sacrificial 'victim' saved herself. The Soninke sacrificial victim was saved by her fiance.

•Li Ji's deed was hailed as heroic by her community. Mamadou's deed, however, went unappreciated by the Soninkes, who saw it as the beginning of their misfortunes.



For a brief history of Ancient Ghana, see BBC World Service: The Story of Africa: Ancient Ghana.



The myth of Sia and the snake has inspired modern works of fiction, including the play "The Legend of Wagadu as seen by Sia Yatabéré" by Mauritanian playwright Moussa Diagana, and "Sia, The Dream of the Python", a film loosely based on Diagana's play.5

- giant snake in the Chinese folktale lived in a cave. Is neutralised by the heroine.

This has even more similarities than the Korean narrative had with the Italian folktale "Cave of the golden rose/Gorge of the sainted dragon" [about princess Fantaghiro]. The golden rose turned out to be the gullet of the Dragon that lived in the cave in the gorge. At her birth, the king, sick of having only daughters, wanted to sacrifice his latest daughter to the Dragon at its cave to end the disastrous spell of only-daughters (he needed a son to succeed him as he was at war). He's prevented from sacrificing his infant daughter by the female spirit of the forest. Later the princess grows up, dresses like a man so she can defeat the neighbouring king in a duel as was prophesied (the 2 kingdoms were at war "since time immemorial"). Instead the neighbouring king invites her to visit the Gorge of the dragon, since he suspects she's a girl he'd once seen. The Dragon at the cave is supposed to eat only women and kill all men. The princess dupes the dragon - who can't tell what gender she is as she's entered straight into his throat, and so can't decide whether he should eat her or kill her. She tickles it into sneezing, which causes the cave opening to be closed off therewith - with the dragon stuck in there - whle she herself is safely blown out of the cave alive. (The enemy king is none the wiser about her gender either. The tale doesn't stop with her restrainign the dragon in its den however. Eventually she beats the 'enemy' king in the arranged duel and as punishment for his losing/his kingdom losing and to secure lasting peace between the two kingdoms, her dad marries her off to the defeated king, who's no longer the enemy now, and the two kingdoms are joined.)



The similarities of heroine defeating a giant snake/dragon living in a cave that eats women may be mere coincidence [yet it wouldn't ever be considered coincidence if it concerned a "PIE trope" of course]. In any case, there's no need to pretend that this folktale travelled to China, sooner the other way around. (Even the Cinderella fairy tale was originally a Chinese folktale - and is recorded in China a whole 1000 years before the earliest documented Cinderella story in the west or ME. Not to mention the whole "tiniest feet" thing only ever made sense in a Chinese setting.)



- [color="#0000FF"]ADDED: Missed this before, but Li Ji lures the Chinese Giant Snake into position using rice. (As opposed to rice-wine that was used to lure the Japanese Orochi to the trap.) Again, the Chinese snake is attracted by the fragrant smell of the rice. Presumably Orochi was attracted by the fragrant smell of rice-wine. It was then that Li-Ji and and her dog then set about attacking the duped man-eating Chinese Serpent.[/color]



- Both Chinese and Ghanan cases above show a human hero fighting a giant snake or even magically powerful (God) snake that demanded human sacrifices - maidens in fact, same as in the case of Orochi in Japan.

- Bida, the Ghanan Snake God, had multiple heads (as seen in the statement "hydra-like properties of regenerating its severed heads")

- The hydra-like self-regenerating heads of the Ghanan snake God is actually common too. "Hydra" is just more familiar to people exposed to 'western' stuff. Doesn't mean it is unique or the sole original.



African prosperity - then as now (and in most countries outside the African continent too) - depends largely on water supply, so one can surmise that the demise of Bida the Ghanan Snake God which is seen as directly resulting in the decline of Ghana's prosperity, could be owing to loss of the Snake God's protection in ensuring the adequate amount of water (and related environmental/food) supply. In many African communities throughout the African continent, Snake Gods are (still) worshipped as controllers of flood and drought. Examples of this will follow.