The Year of the Rat is approaching, and we Chinese people have unusual feelings towards rats. Maybe, when we celebrate New Year's Eve, the mouse is also busy doing happy things! Why do mice always marry cats in legends? It's hard to say. Maybe this is the cat's revenge - who put the mouse at the top of the zodiac, while the cat was not on the list?
According to modern people's feelings towards rats, one would wonder why rats can be included in the Chinese zodiac, ranking first, but cats cannot be on the list.
The answer to this question is: the twelve zodiac animals reflect the life of our ancient ancestors, not the life of modern people. The ancestors admired the mouse very much when they saw its agility and its dancing eyes. Our local customs still believe that people who resemble rats are smart, which is a relic of this ancient bionics.
——The rat in the mural appears as a child god, playing the role of warding off evil spirits, bringing in spirits, and attracting souls
The spirituality of the rat is not limited to intelligence. It can "bite the sky." "Open" and guide people to ascend to the paradise world, their ability is really amazing! This is based on archeology - from 1979 to 1981, when the tomb of Lou Rui, Prince of Dong'an County in Taiyuan, Shanxi, was excavated in the first year of Wuping in the Northern Qi Dynasty (570), it was discovered that there were star maps painted on the top of the tomb hall and the upper and middle columns. , twelve zodiac signs, Thunder God, Lightning Mother and other murals. Among them, the twelve zodiac signs are the first to be seen. It is located around the upper railing of the tomb. It is arranged in the order of rat to the north and rabbit to the east. It is 1 meter high and 4.3 meters long. Only rats, cows, tigers and rabbits remain. The murals in the tomb are based on auspiciousness and celestial phenomena, which are used to ward off victory, drive away evil spirits, and guide the soul of the tomb owner to ascend to heaven. The rat in the mural appears in the form of a child god, and also plays the role of warding off evil spirits, bringing in spirits, and attracting spirits.
This kind of rat boss philosophy is really strange to modern people, but it is part of the spiritual history of ancient people.
——"The Book of Songs·Shuo Mouse" is the rebellious expression of ancestors' worship of mice
Of course, the ancients' feelings towards mice were not single. "The Book of Songs: Shuo Mouse" says: "Shuo Shuo Mouse has no food for my millet. I am not willing to take care of a three-year-old girl. The girl who is about to die is suitable for the paradise. The paradise of paradise, love is mine." Big mouse Big mouse, don’t eat our grains. I have fed you for so many years, but you haven’t seen me taking care of us. Leaving you, we will find our own paradise, that is where we will settle.
This is actually a rebellion against the worship of mice expressed by our ancestors. This emotion has gradually become mainstream and is familiar to modern people, so much so that a children's song in Taiwan refers to mice in this way: "One mouse is a thief, two oxen drive a plow brother. Three tiger mountains are rugged, four rabbits travel in Tokyo. Five dragons are ordered by the emperor, Six snakes were frightened, seven horses ran to the barracks, eight sheep grazed on the grass, nine monkeys climbed on the treetops, ten chickens crowed three times, and twelve pigs were killed by choppers." of contempt.
As for the cleverness of rats, it is also completely subverted in the following Suzhou song selling rat wedding paintings in Taohuawu:
It’s bad on New Year’s Eve, rats It’s so fun to do. Ge (this) mouse is so dexterous, and he has a lot of picks for the toilet chamber pot. There are two or three embroidered quilts, red lacquer strips and gold thread tracing. There is also a porcelain vase on this side of the grid, and a feather duster is stuck in place. This mouse is really cute. He is smiling while sitting in the sedan chair. His head was covered with a red scarf and he was wearing a floral cotton-padded jacket. They went to get married in a hurry, and relatives and friends followed in a hurry. There was also a yellow cat next to him, and he ate everything up.
Almost all folk paper-cuts and New Year pictures on the theme of "mouse getting married" include a "yellow cat", which is used to laugh at the "boldness" and "dementia" of the mouse. The so-called "hundred days of good luck" When I returned home from the wedding, a brave mouse came to welcome me. I met a civet cat three times and stood behind the mountain. He swallowed it and died." That's right.
——The Mouse Marriage, a New Year’s Fairy Tale
Of course, there are also people who look at the “Mouse Marriage” from the perspective of “fairy tale artistic conception”.
"Yucheng Chronicles" records that people there banned lights on the seventeenth night of the first lunar month to facilitate the marriage of rats. Hangzhou custom says that on New Year's Eve, a rat marries a girl and steals her shoes for a sedan chair. An anonymous person in ancient times described that scene: "When I was a child, I used my shoes as a chariot for the rats. The rat woman came to pay homage to the rat aunt, but the rat aunt stood up and thanked her." Zhou Zuoren once wrote a poem on this subject. Said: "The mice are also getting married today, and the doors are filled with lanterns and torches.
The bride wears red clothes and trousers as usual, and has ten hairs of beard raised. "How can this be a mouse? It's clearly a human being!
Mr. Lu Xun looked at mice even more highly. He wrote in "Dog·Cat·Rat" in "Morning Blossoms Picked at Dusk": In front of my bed There are two floral papers on it, one is "Bajie invites a bride", the paper is full of long mouth and big ears, which I think is not very elegant. The other one is "Rat getting married" but it is cute. All the deacons have pointy cheeks and thin legs, which look like a disgrace to scholars, but wearing red shirts and green trousers is vulgar. When they meet human wedding ceremony guards on the road, they just treat them as advertisements for sexual intercourse, and they don’t pay much attention to them; At that time, I wanted to see the "mice getting married" ceremony, but I was extremely fascinated.
Mr. Lao She "explained" the humor in Lu Xun's passage in "The Cat's Breakfast". Lao She said that his house was full of rats, so he bought a cat to catch rats. However, the cat was small and thin. Lao She tied it with a rope, not because he was afraid that it would run away, but because he was afraid that the rats would hit it and eat it. Under Mr. Lao She's careful care, the cat's diet gradually expanded, and one morning, Lao She found that it had caught a half-lived mouse, and there were two dead frogs next to it. It even ate the frogs! Animals. Lao She lamented on the side that he was quitting smoking, drinking, tea, and eating meat, as if his fate with that cat had been reversed.
Speaking of cats, I should talk about the beginning of this article. That question: Why is there no cat in the zodiac? Because in the era when the zodiac was created, there was no cat in people's lives.
The birth year of people born in the year of the rat. :
1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008, 2020
The years whose AD year number is divided by 12 and the remainder is 4 are all Years of the Rat
The formula is: AD year number ÷ 12 = a certain quotient, and the remainder is 4.
For example: 2008 ÷ 12 = quotient 167, and the remainder is 4. Then, 2008 is. Year of the Rat.
Note that the above is only a rough correspondence, because the world-wide Gregorian calendar and the Chinese Ganzhi calendar are two different calendars.
The Year of the Rat starts from the 24 solar terms. The beginning of spring is because the zodiac year is attached to the chronology of the stems and branches, and the chronology of the stems and branches is the way of counting the years. This is the case in the official almanacs of all dynasties (i.e., the lunar calendar). , there is no dispute on this point. The lunar calendar and the Ganzhi calendar are two different calendars. They are different in the starting point of the year, the rules of dividing the months, the number of days in each year, etc. Since the Gregorian calendar was used after the Republic of China, many people, including a very few so-called experts, used it. There is a lack of calendar knowledge, so the two are often confused.
The Ganzhi calendar is a calendar that uses 60 different groups of heavenly stems and earthly branches to mark the year, month, day, and time. It is unique to China. The solar calendar begins with the beginning of the year and is divided into twelve months with twenty-four solar terms. Each month contains two solar terms and there are no leap months. The Ganzhi calendar is related to the cyclical movement of the earth around the sun, which can reflect the periodic movement of the earth around the sun. Climate changes throughout the year. Since ancient times, the Ganzhi calendar has been commonly understood by officials and people. It is used in astronomy, Feng Shui, numerology, selection and traditional Chinese medicine, and is recorded in the official almanacs of all dynasties (i.e., the almanac). Take the Qing Dynasty's official history book "Qing Shi Lu" as an example. The chronology of the stems and branches in the book all use the beginning of spring as the dividing point: For example, Zhonghua Book Company photocopied the seventeenth volume of "Qing Shi Lu", the ninth volume of Qianlong Shi Lu, page 573, Qianlong Spring began on December 22 of the twenty-seventh year (Gengxu). The record in "Shilu" is: "Gengxu. It was the beginning of spring in the year of Guiwei." See also Chapter 95 of "A Dream of Red Mansions" in the Qing Dynasty: "It is the beginning of spring." The beginning of spring was on December 18th of the Jiayin year, and the death day of the Yuanchun year was December 19th, which was already the Yin month of the Mao year." This clearly points out the switching point of the Ganzhi calendar in recording the years and months.