Mythology
In Chinese mythology Shennong, besides having taught humans the use of the plow together with other aspects of basic agriculture, the use of medicinal plants, and having been a god of the burning wind (perhaps in some relationship to the Yan Emperor mythos and/or slash-and-burn agriculture, in which the ash produced by fire fertilizes the fields), was sometimes said to be a progenitor to, or to have had appointed as one of his ministers, Chi You; and like him, they were both ox-headed, sharp-horned, bronze-foreheaded, and iron-skulled. One difference between mythology and science is exemplified in Chinese mythology: Shennong and Huangdi (often known as "the Yellow Emperor") were supposedly friends and fellow scholars, despite the 500 years or seventeen or eighteen generations between the first Shennong and Huangdi; and, that together they shared the alchemical secrets of medicine, immortality, and making gold.
According to the eighth century CE historian Sima Zhen's commentary to the second century BCE Shiji (or, Records of the Grand Historian), Shennong is a kinsman of the Yellow Emperor and is said to be an ancestor, or a patriarch, of the ancient forebears of the Chinese. The Han Chinese regarded them both as their joint ancestors.
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Famous quotes containing the word mythology:
“This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the United States there’s a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)