Nüwa Mends the Sky
The four pillars holding up the sky snap and the quarters of the earth give way, so that fire burns without going out, water floods without draining, and beasts take the people who are left. The serpent-bodied goddess smelts stones of five colors to patch the hole in heaven, cuts the legs from a giant turtle to prop the corners, and heaps the ash of burnt reeds against the water; in the other tradition attached to her she has already made human beings by pinching them from yellow earth and then, tiring, by dragging a cord through mud. Preserved in the Huainanzi and the Liezi rather than in any sacred book of its own, it is the nearest thing early China has to a creation account with a maker in it.
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Lineage
- shares sources with ↑ Chang'e Flies to the Moon
Attributes
Closest analogues
- 51% · 9 shared
- 51% · 8 shared
- 47% · 8 shared
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- 44% · 8 shared
- 44% · 6 shared