The History of China - Extra: Interview with Vince & Cassie of the Autocrat Podcast

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

A chat with Vince and Cassie of the Autocrat Podcast comparing and contrasting the Roman and Chinese origins and genesis legends, folktales, & mythos. Find Autocrat Podcast at: autocratpodcast.wordpress.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 14th. Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Hey everyone, so today we've got something a little bit out of the ordinary. About six or eight months back, I was contacted by Vince and Cassie, the two lovely hosts of the podcast Autocrats, about Roman history, wanting me to come on and talk about a topic on Chinese history with them and how it might relate to what they were talking about with Roman history. But at that point, I actually had to write them back and put off any kind of scheduling because I was in the midst of a big life change.

And so I asked if we could please come back to this at a later date and, you know, take it up then. I flash forward to this past summer, and I'm finally feeling ready to go, and they and I are back in touch, and then I go ahead and I fall down some stairs and throw out my shoulder, pretty much spoiling my next couple of months altogether. But all of this to say, Vince and Cassie were extremely understanding and willing to reschedule multiple times. So thanks very much to the both of you. Please do go and check out their show. The Autocrat's podcast is autocratpodcast.wordpress.com. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that you will too. So without further ado, here it is. Hello everyone and welcome to Autocrat and today is a special bonus episode because we have got Chris Stewart from the wonderful History of China here.

And we're going to be talking about the Chinese versions of the myths that we have talked about, such as the creation of the universe and the Great Flood. So, Chris, welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. Hi there, happy to be here. So, first off, I guess we wanted to ask you about the one or possibly multiple versions of the Chinese creation story that are floating around. Because in Greek mythology, and I imagine it's also the case for China, there's no one version of how things took place. Yeah, that is very much the same. There is no one single myth, but there are, much like in many other cultures,

very popular myths are ones that have kind of become the more central or agreed-upon version of things, and that's certainly the case in China. That story goes that the universe just sort of exists, but it's in this different state of being, and it's represented as a giant cosmic egg, essentially. And then they get very, very detailed into how many cycles and years and eons pass that this egg is just sort of sitting there in nothingness. But eventually it separates out into what amounts to whites and yolks, which becomes the firmaments above and the terra firma below.

And the egg cracks open and the world is born anew. So it's this kind of cyclical renewal of things. But in this new world, there are no people. Right no people right so of course we've got to solve that problem we do have these two creator deities creators of humanity which is remarkably matriarchal in nature so i said there's there's a pair of these deities. The male figure is Fushi, and the female figure is Nuwa. Both of them are like these weird sort of snake hybrid creatures. Yeah, they're pretty weird. Nuwa is lonely, and she wants basically some friends.

And so out of the dirt dirt she creates these little figurines which eventually become actual flesh and blood people and if i'm remembering it right and probably some version of it is this and probably some version of it is something different fushi her husband then gets jealous enough to usurp her, basically take over authority and establish male authority thereafter. Okay. So it also explains sort of the gendered division of society. Wow. I guess the Chinese equivalent of one of the Jusso stories, in a way, explaining how the patriarchy came to be.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And especially the early mythologies and the folk beliefs of how things were created or came to be the way that they are, are that very kind of Aesopian moralistic tale of, and that's the moral of the story kind of a thing. Yeah. Now, is that connected, I wonder, because you mentioned it, to the Confucian system? For the impression I get is that's quite moralistic in its teachings, right? So I might be going off completely down the wrong path here, but do you think that that sort of inspired a very moralistic idea of how China or the world came to be? So Confucianism comes out as a reaction to the political and social upheaval that had been

going on in china for like 700 years or so at that point it's called the warring states period really creative we do get the spring and autumn out of it which is actually genuinely creative. And so it is looking at the state of the world as they understood it as being totally chaotic and out of balance and dangerous and deadly, but it wasn't always so. And so Confucianism says, look, back when we were behaving in a more moral, civilized manner, life was good. The Zhou Dynasty, which came before, was incredible and fantastic, and we want to get back to being like that again. So we need to institute

this strong system of morality, this sort of top-down, benevolent system of morality where the ruler is good and that will make the people good, in order to, in this sort of a beneficial cycle, he's very much an optimist confucius and then everybody will be good it is striking how many parallels there are in a way with the greek mythology story you mentioned i forget the name of the deity creating humans out of dirt is that right and yes from memory prometheus does something very similar over in our world let's call it the greek sphere of influence oh yeah our one for the lack of a better term but it's interesting that so the early creation story in china is very cyclical we were saying right that is if you can call a story a shape yeah yes it is much more rounder

and more psychical than sort of the western traditional arc which is very much forward-looking and progressively oriented you know the the future is going to be better than the past we all sort of believe that intrinsically whereas a lot of this confusion east asian chinese philosophy tends to be much more backwards looking and everything that once was will be again kind of a thing okay history rhymes i think the greeks have something a bit similar with the whole idea of the age of gold and then the ages slowly become more and more corrupt just before we get to the big flood i think think. But yeah, sort of similar looking backwards and thinking the past was the glory days. Yeah, and it's another interesting example

that can be pulled from a certain sects of Buddhism, of course, popular all across Asia and India. Not that India isn't part of Asia, but there was a given sect called the Mrayan sect which especially became prevalent in and around china in the 12th and 13th centuries and it was believing that actually the time of the gautama buddha was coming to an end because it had fallen into a state of depravity where people were no longer following the sutras and had fallen out of cosmic balance. And so this new Buddha was going to come around, Maitreya,

and basically cleanse the earth in this flood of light destruction. But only the worthy would be saved. But yeah, you see these similar sort of tales all over the world. Yeah. I had a question because I read a paragraph in a book I have called Talking About Myth, which I really love, which it recounted that story of the egg, but inside the egg there was this half-divine man called Pengu.

Was that easy? Is it a different kind of the story, a different version? Yes, it's as you say, it's one of those tellings that sometimes it'll be present, sometimes it'll be kind of not present. But yes, I really did just not think to mention Pangu, but he's typically a part of that whole story as well. And he's a representation kind of of the land forms of earth and the sort of like in the genesis of the bible where it describes how everything was rent apart from everything

else and became itself pangu takes his own body parts and turns them into the trees and the dirt and the water and sometimes the people as well. Why not? I just like the idea that there's just this one man in an egg because it brings back the question so what's it going to be for the egg or the person? Can they both have the same time?

That's a really interesting point and it's kind of one of those deliberately unanswered questions in the whole mythology of, well, yeah, this thing, whatever start point the world came from as it exists today, it came from something else. Where did that come from? It wasn't just created ex nihilo out of nothing, but we don't know what came before. And it's just sort of comfortable with that ambiguity. Yeah. Well, I think Chinese mythology wins the contest of the more inventive cosmogony.

All we've had so far is confusion about whether certain individuals came from eggs or which god came from which. Honestly, the genealogy of Eros is insane when you drill down into it no one agrees on anything when you really get down deep into these very old um legends and tales you do really start to see that they did come just from telling and retelling of stories and every time the story gets told some elements are added or subtracted you get multiple versions and then we

kind of come back later on and clean up the versions of stories that we like a little bit and repackage them but they did come from you know a whole bunch of different bored people sitting in the dark telling each other stories so we've brought about the creation of the world in the chinese mindsets at least the world exists now. But how do we get from there to the sort of cyclical system of dynasties and nations and attempts to unify China around about the flood? The drive to unify came about very early on, and it stems this idea, you know, the divine mandate of rule right which is that well essentially heaven chooses the ideal candidate for the job and they should get dominion over the four corners of

the earth as it was known at the time or all under heaven as it's often rendered and so mythologically at least there's these nine provinces, which are interconnected via riverways, that encapsulate what the Chinese imagine to be the entire world, or at least the world that matters to them. Everything outside of that is just sort of this dark, barbaric, awful wasteland. Why would you go there but within that those nine provinces which become the classical ancient core of what china comes to be uh you get these these kings which stem out of as you see in so many traditions the kings stem out of being divine communicators yeah essentially the ones who can ask the

really burning questions to the spirits and gods and ancestors that you really got to know. That is considered especially important across Chinese history because the river systems tend to be pretty uncooperative and not terribly predictable especially the yellow river is infamous for that of being not only the basis and the heart of where china and chinese civilization sprang from but also probably one of the biggest murderers of chinese people ever it just killed so many people yeah so if i understand correctly once we have the creation of the world we go through a series of divine or semi-divine kings and emperors on our way towards a more human-led society they're commonly known as the three sovereigns and five kings or sometimes they're

called emperors uh the translations gets a little loose in how it does that yeah um and as you say it starts from essentially gods and demigods with the sovereigns and these are cultural folk heroes as it were one of them for instance teaches humanity about fire and how to properly use that. One of them teaches them about agriculture and cultivation and also medicines and tea and poisons and what have you. And then, yes, you get down into, he's sometimes classified as both a sovereign and one of the five emperors, but you, or as he's known, you the great. And it is from his period that we get the mythology of the Great Flood. Right.

Now, I understand, although I am not an expert by any means on the Chinese flood narrative, that there has been at least some debate as to whether the flood myth was something inspired by a real historical event in the sense that I believe there was a paper from 2015 which had the argument that the Yellow River might indeed have flooded due to a lake breaching or a dam breaching in a lake in about 1920 BCE. So have you got any more insight into whether this actually is a big debate or whether I'm just nibbling at the edges of academia here? Well, it's hard to say for certain, of course, but there does seem to be at least some views to take seriously that it may have been the case that there may have been indeed some kind of significant flooding event, probably not as world-ending as the stories eventually tell it, but again, if we even just look at the actual history that we have,

the region and its climate overall, the idea of a dam being breached or a river changing its course drastically and causing widespread death and destruction via famine and drought and what have you. That's not really mythological. That's just kind of normal. You'd be hard-pressed to find a king or a reign era where that wasn't happening in some part of it. Yeah. Hit pause on whatever you're listening to and hit play on your next adventure.

Stay two nights and get a $50 Best Western gift card. Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Visit bestwestern.com for complete terms and conditions. So the myth of the flood is very tied, as you say, to you the Great, or I believe is he You the Engineer sometimes? Also, yes, and this is for exactly what he did allegedly in the course

of the Flood. Yeah, which I will say is a fantastic nickname. Oh, yeah, I agree. It's great. It's right up there with Ivalio the Cabbage. I believe it's an obscure Bulgarian somewhere, but anyway, You the engineer is a close second i'll take it sure on his behalf so yeah he comes along in this period that the river systems have

all clogged up which has caused them to flood and what he's winds up deciding needs to be done and undertakes it is, well, then we've got to dredge the bottom of these river systems and get them flowing and regularly navigable again. Among them, I think most notably, are these giant black half-dragon, half-curtain creatures, which you kind of use as a giant shovel machine to get the dirt out of the river and move it to dry land. Wow. And he has fleets of these things, apparently. But this takes decades and decades to achieve, regardless. He's not a very good parent, as a matter of fact, rather famously. This flood supposedly begins right after he's gotten married to his wife, and she's become pregnant with what will eventually be their eldest son.

And so then he goes off to start dealing with this flood. And the story goes, he only sees his son three times in the course of his entire childhood. Once when he's born, once as he's walking by and he's just barely able to walk. And then once when he's already reading and writing and studying for school. But he never goes in to see him. He's too busy. He's got to control this flood for something like 13 years. But he does it. Not going to win Father of for something like 13 years but he does it not

going to win father of the year award though no definitely not so a common theme that i've seen in at least one paper is that in the majority of stories which have floods there is a chosen individual or family who gets saved and i was wondering wondering if, in a way, you, the Great, might not fit that narrative of being maybe not the one who's saved out of all humanity, but he definitely goes on to have a pretty good impact afterwards, founding the Shah dynasty. It's hard to beat becoming a dynastic founder. That's pretty top tier as far as things go,

being the chosen one. Absolutely. So I'd say there's probably some merit to that. Yeah, he would probably fit into that analog, that box as well. Another figure, much later on than you, that you could maybe also apply a similar kind of shape or archetype to would be right at the Qin Dynasty. Before the Han Dynasty, you get Liu Bang, who was supposedly born under a waterfall during a rainstorm after its mother coupled with a dragon.

Wow. Kind of. Yeah. So, as far as water-based portents go, he got a good one, too. Yeah. There's quite a few father-of- of the Year contenders, it seems. First you, the Great, and now a dragon. Absolutely.

Hey, he didn't stick around, I think. Yeah. Well, if it's any consolation, Kronos in Greek mythology is not much better. I mean, he ate his own children, so you've got that on him at least. Really takes that fatherly affection a little too far. Yeah. It is fascinating, though, how many cultures across the world have this idea of a flood myth. You know, we see it in Greek mythology.

We see it in China. I think, isn't it, even in the Epic of Gilgamesh, there's a flood myth as well. And in the Bible, obviously. It's interesting how many parallels there are between flood myth as well, and in the Bible, obviously. It's interesting how many parallels there are between at least Chinese and Greek mythology in that sense. Yeah, it is. It is. And I think, you know, if I put my historian hat on, I guess, I think we could probably find a pretty good explanation for that a lot of the time in the fact that waterways and access to it

were so terribly important for early people and that idea of trying to get control over water because it's such a powerful force both useful and very dangerous is one of the really primal first things that any budding civilization has to accomplish yeah so it would make sense it would take precedence across cultures everybody needs water so you were saying that the yellow river is rather capricious and unpredictable right in how it floods yeah and what i find interesting is that i seem to remember hearing once that the Egyptian gods may have become very much more cyclical and calm and predictable because the Nile was so predictable. And from what you've told us here, it doesn't feel like the unpredictability and violence of the Yellow River has necessarily translated into how the gods of china behave well i would not call any of the spirits or gods necessarily hostile or vicious yeah or evil in a sense and they're not typically so what they are

is very ambiguous to the very idea of humanity existing at all. They really don't care. They don't care if you live or die. And they, they need to be appeased because otherwise even worse things will happen. But you know, your only defense against what the gods might do is your family members, your ancestors, the ones who can act as intermediaries,

unless long as they're happy. So you got to keep the family happy even after they're dead. your ancestors, the ones who can act as intermediaries, how long is their happy? So you've got to keep the family happy, even after they're dead, in order to have a chance of knowing what's coming down the pipes. Yeah. So I guess China might fall in the middle between, in the example I gave, Egypt's predictability and the capriciousness of the Mesopotamian gods, in a sense. They're more neutral towards humanity, right?

Yeah, they can be studied, they can be affected and appeased, but they can also behave in cycles or in patterns that at least can be partially understood. But you'd never fully be able to control them or understand them. Yeah. understood but you'd never fully be able to control them or understand them yeah which of the many chinese myths you can think of which one would be your favorite one to tell oh which one should i read next which one should you read next um let me think here um i'm gonna have to go with probably one of the classics Have you read Journey to the West?

Not yet, I've always wanted to It's really good Oh, it's great It is like a 16th century comic book It's a wonderful story If you get the full version It gets a little Villain of the Week Episodic towards the middle

But the beginning and the ends are fantastic. I'm going to try I've seen it in a bookshop here in an old cloth-bound classic look and I've really wanted to read it because I keep reading, I have books of mythology like of around

the world, but I want to dive deeper into big myth. Yeah, it's a very good intro into kind of the overall spirit of chinese mahayana buddhist sort of overall idea and how they see the universe as well as just being a genuinely fun story that is designed to be fun and it's it's approachable and it's not a war and peace length novel either it's it's fairly tight well since we do more roman history and greek mythology or mythology which one of our myths would be one of your favorite one or one do you really like hearing about probably some of the the mythologies of europe that most fascinate me

and maybe it's because we still know somewhat less about it than we do the greeks or romans or the norse gods which have been taken up by marvel and made very very popular in a certain sense, but the actual... But it's very not accurate. No, no, I... No. The actual myths are very interesting, and just how we only have kind of fragments of them that survive, which adds a little bit more mystery. Yeah. I think there's,

again, parallels with China, in the sense that, if memory serves, isn't the world created in Norse mythology out of the remains of a frost giant, very similar to Pangu? Yeah. The idea of the self-sacrifice in order to create is a very interesting parallel that you can also see in Aztec mythology as well. One of their gods killed itself and made its body into the world as well which is you know brutal but i guess you kind of are living in a brutal world and maybe that explains why

well it seems the theme of self-sacrifice is a much nobler way to end it than perhaps the parenting skills of you the engineer or other cruelties like Kronos. Or Heracles. Or Heracles, indeed, yeah. So, that's it for this episode. Thank you all very much for listening, and please do remember to check out Chris's wonderful podcast, The History of China. Yes.

We're now closer to the Qing Dynasty and the modern period than mythology, perhaps, but the whole story will be there from start to finish. In October, I do release mythological stories as well, which I call Strange Tale Episodes. So that's a little seasonal tag

as well. Very nice. Well, once again, feel free to go and check that out, and thank you very much for listening, everyone, and have a great week. And thank you for coming on to the show. Thank you very much, Chris. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. And have a great week. And thank you for coming on to the show. Thank you very much, Chris. Thank you very much. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history.

When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.