It is common knowledge that the Chinese zodiac is the year when rats are first, but why should such a seemingly inconspicuous or even unlovable animal be liked? Lead, but it is difficult to explain.
The popular saying is: Heaven originally wanted to arrange the cattle first, but the sly mouse sat on the horns of the ox and jumped to the front of the cattle at the last moment, ranking first. The Bars (Year of the Tiger) in the Turkic Dictionary, compiled in 1074, also has a legend: A khan decided to set up a chronology because he made an error in calculating the age of a war and ordered animals to cross the Ili River. , “Twelve of them have crossed the river, so the names of these twelve animals were used as the names of the twelve years.” The order in which they crossed the river was: rat, cow, tiger, rabbit, crocodile , Snake, horse, sheep, monkey, chicken, dog, pig. Except for the replacement of the “dragon” in the Han culture with the “crocodile”, the zodiac signs and the order are completely the same.
However, it is conceivable that this is an explanatory legend that has arisen because posterity has “know it but not know why”. Just as later generations did not know that “Wuxi” was originally an ancient Vietnamese language, but the strong solution was that “there is a tin mine here, and the post-Xishan mining is completed, there is no tin, so the name”. This is usually regarded as folk etymology. In ancient Greek mythology, there is a kind of inferential mythology, that is, a myth that explains the origin or sake of certain phenomena, events, and names.
These are certainly not historical truths. So, what is a reasonable explanation on this issue?
Chinese Zodiac signs are closely related to traditional timekeeping, Yijing gossip, Chinese medicine, etc.
Chinalization of the twelve zodiac signs
Zodiac signs are now considered one of the most typical Chinese cultural features, but their originsIt has been a mystery for a long time. It was not until modern times that the country opened wide that people discovered that not only China has the zodiac signs, but also Egypt, Greece, and India, but that the types and order of animals are not exactly the same-for example, the Indian zodiac sign corresponds to the tiger. The counterpart to the dragon is Capricorna (the python god of one of the eight dragons).
Guo Moruo believes that the zodiac signs of all ethnic groups in the world can be traced back to Babylon in Cuba. Residents of Central Asia have imitated Babylonian signs of the zodiac, and only then spread to China; The twelve earthly branches that have been used since ancient times are the zodiac.
Portrait of the Zodiac, from the Western Middle Ages, “Book of Luxury Prayer for the Duke of Bailey”, created from 1412 to 1416
Although there are still some details of disputes among scholars on this issue, it is generally agreed that the Babylonians of the two river basins first linked the zodiac signs to the constellations represented by the twelve deities. This began to spread around 3,000 BC with its astrology, which led to the development of the twelve constellations in the West and the zodiac in the East.
The signs of the zodiac are matched with the twelve gods and beasts, so they were called “animal circles, animal belts” by the ancient Greeks, and then simplified to zōidiakòs (‘circle of animals’), which is the etymology of zodiac in English and another English The word zoo (zoo) can be traced back to the Greek zōion (“动””Tip” refers to a four-legged animal that can run on the mountain; “He” refers to a small animal that has four legs and can climb on a tree; “Er” refers to an animal that can fly with two legs. In Japanese, “rat” The etymology of (ネ ズ ミ, nezumi) also refers to “animals that live in the dark”, not specifically.
We still refer to more than 9,000 different birds as “birds”, but we will no longer call all burrowing animals “rats”, and their meanings have been narrowed. However, the first traces can still be seen in Chinese characters: those with “rats” as their radicals, including different animals such as ferrets, tadpoles, and some of them are not even rodents belonging to mice at all, such as the genus Plover The mole is an insectivorous order. Marten (鼦) is now regarded as a carnivorous weasel, but Shuo Wen Jie Zi said: “Marten, genus.” And the term “mole” can even be used to refer to insect-like stings. Li Shizhen’s Compendium of Materia Medica · Beast III · Mole: “Mole is everywhere, in the soil hole, in the tree hole … It is good to eat millet and beans, and it is a harm to the mole.” Compendium of Materia Medica “says:” 蝼蛄 一 Name Mole. ‘That’s also it.’
In Chinese, squirrels, flying squirrels (bats), etc. can also be seen. In the minds of the ancients, “rat” refers not only to rats, but also to many animals similar to rats. Beavers and porcupines belong to the rodent order. It is not considered a rodent. Weasel, marten, sea otter, and tadpole are all related, but judging by the word formation, the Chinese think that they belong to rodents and beasts, and sometimes even ambiguous. For example, tadpoles can be called “marmots” or “marmots” . In Japanese, even hedgehogs are called “Needle Rats”. All these show that the ancients used animal appearance classification based on similarities in appearance and habits. Although it looks “unscientific”, think about it. Kangaroo in Australia, the same as the Chinese in modern times, learned the same way. His shape is translated as “kangaroo”, although it is not the same as a mouse, not even subclass.
As the “rat” of a nomadic burrowing animal, it has special meaning to the ancients. This is not only because they are convinced that the “yang”, which represents the origin of life, began to germinate at midnight, but also because in this view of the universe, the acupoint itself is where the life of the universe was born. The so-called “Xuanzhi and Xuanzhi, the gates of all mysteries”, life is born from Confucianism. In the view of the gasified universe, the cave is especially rich in living things.The same characteristic is the cave, the whereabouts of the secret. In fact, many Chinese folk fairy tales of fox fairy and fox maid are likely to come from this. In this sense, the belief in the mysterious and unpredictable changes of cave-dwelling animals has not disappeared, but has only been transferred from rats to foxes.