Alas,
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princeofcairo seems to have given up (temporarily, one hopes) on daily 100-word entries. I've gotten a lot of amusement out of those posted so far, from slack-jawed amazement at his
Marlovian sonnet to an intellectual treasure hunt inspired by his
offhand comments on Chinese mythology.
One of the latter was:
However, just as reading the Iliad is the only good way to begin studying Greek mythology, I don't think reading a bunch of Chinese myths without being able to set them in an epic, legendary context would be very helpful.
I know this will seem completely inconsistent with what some of you know of my educational background, but I've never read the
Iliad. (If we had a game going of David Lodge's "Humiliation", how many points would that net me?) Unsurprisingly, I disagreed, offering as evidence Ovid's
Metamorphoses, which is a fantastic, satisfying, and memorable introduction to Greek mythology despite not being in any way "epic". I wish I could say that it was
my introduction, but I came to the subject as I'm sure many of us did, through popular illustrated retellings in children's books.
monshu actually owns one of these for Chinese mythology, but I never saw anything like it when I was younger. My introduction there was the
Funk & Wagnalls standard dictionary of folklore, mythology, and legend, which is made up chiefly of one-paragraph entries on various mythical figures and popular practices. As a result, any knowledge I gleaned on the Chinese pantheon was fractured and forgettable. When I finally found a comprehensive book on Chinese mythology, I discover that the roots of the problem lay in the fact that the historical record
itself is fractured and forgotten, consisting chiefly of, at
best, one-paragraph accounts.
That book was Nuphy's copy of Anne Birrell's
Chinese mythology : an introduction. From the preface:
China did not enjoy the phenomenon of gifted poets like Homer and Hesiod of the ninth and eighth centuries B.C., who retold ancient myths in an eloquent literary mode. In the Chinese case, myths at first appeared in a piecemeal fashion, in a variety of versions, fragmented and truncated, and were collated as mythological material only fairly late, if at all.
I soon lost interest. The sketchy stories didn't capture my imagination and a lack of larger context--or even genealogical charts--made it difficult for me to see how the various characters were interrelated.
In the end, the only bits of Chinese mythology that
have stuck with me are those incorporated into popular folklore, particularly that linked to festivals and other observances. I've already mentioned the lunar mythology attached to the Mid-Autumn Festival, but there's also the tale of Qu Yuan, which underlies the Dragon Boat Festival, and that of the Kitchen God, associated with New Year's. Or the mythology of the Hells, which is certainly memorable, but also heavily derived from alien, Indian sources. It doesn't add up to a lot.
Fortunately, I may have found another approach. China never had a Hesiod, but at least it didn't lack for Thucydides. Sima Qian's
Shi ji was the first attempt to supersede the tradition of slanted dynastic histories with a comprehensive chronicle of the Middle Kingdom. To this end, he (and his father, whose work he was completing) had to reach back to the earliest accounts and impose an orderly progression on what they found. Such a process is distortional--as, in fact, Hesiod's attempts to synthesise a great mess of local oral tradition must have been--and even more so due to the Confucian lens through which the Grand Historian was looking, which reduced the primeval deities who shaped the world itself to mere officials in previous administrations (a tendency also present in sources like the Zhou dynasty
Shu jing, also known as the "Classic of History") and players in morality plays meant to illustrate philosophical principles (something Daoist writers like Zhuangzi were also guilty of).
Still, it does impose a coherent narrative context. Once one has committed that to memory, it should become easier to attach other bits of knowledge--such as that Hou Ji, who Sima makes Minister of Agriculture to Emperors Yao and Shun, was in origin a cereal deity who could equally well have been female or that the "rebels" subdued by Huang Di (such as Chi You or Kui) can be viewed as personifications of chaotic forces of nature.
I'll let y'all know how it goes.
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