Archaic Myth: One Story, Six Books, Six Versions
The Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Huainanzi, the Heavenly Questions, the Liezi, In Search of the Supernatural and the Tale of King Mu all record the archaic age, and they do not agree. Who broke the sky Nüwa had to mend, how many suns Yi shot down, what the Queen Mother of the West actually looked like — change the book and you change the story. This chapter does not rule on which version is true. It puts the figures from all six books on one network so the disagreements become visible.
313 figures in this chapter, 49 of whom appear in both history and fiction.
The Queen Mother of the West: from tiger's teeth to the Jade Pool
In the Classic of Mountains and Seas she has "the form of a human, with a leopard's tail and tiger's teeth, and she is good at whistling," with dishevelled hair and a headdress; her office is calamity and punishment. By the Tale of King Mu she is a sovereign hosting a banquet at the Jade Pool, trading sung verses with King Mu of Zhou. The same name covers a half-beast deity of disaster and a literate western queen, several centuries of reimagining apart. Both records hang on the same node here, each with its source.
Mending the sky, shooting the suns: who cleaned up after whom
The Huainanzi's Treatise on Astronomy says Gonggong butted against Mount Buzhou, snapping the pillar of heaven, which is why the sky tilts northwest and the earth runs short in the southeast. The Treatise on Ancient Mysteries then has Nüwa smelt five-coloured stones to patch the sky and cut off a turtle's legs to prop up the four poles. But the Classic of Mountains and Seas draws no such causal line between the two; each appears independently. Yi's story forks the same way: the Huainanzi has ten suns rising in Yao's time and Yi shooting nine down; the Mountains and Seas has the god Jun granting Yi a vermilion bow and ordering him to "succour the lands below." Acting on orders or acting alone — two books, two motives.
Archaic figures in later collections of the strange
In Search of the Supernatural and the Liezi were compiled far later, yet they preserve much older material. The Liezi's Questions of Tang gives us the Foolish Old Man who moved the mountains, Kuafu chasing the sun, and the two boys arguing about the sun — archaic matter in post-Warring-States prose. In Search of the Supernatural mixes immortals and alchemists with historical figures, so Zuo Ci and Yu Ji appear here and in the Records of the Three Kingdoms alike. This site treats such cross-era collections as sources of myth only, never as evidence of when a person lived — otherwise Cao Cao would land in the archaic chapter on the strength of one ghost story.
Where the archaic age joins the Shang and Zhou
This chapter is not an island. The Yellow Emperor, Houji, Cheng Tang and Jie of Xia appear in both the mythological corpus and the Records of the Grand Historian, and they are the real seam between myth and history: the Annals of Zhou begin with Houji, who in the Mountains and Seas is a god who "sows the hundred grains." King Mu of Zhou straddles the divide most plainly — in the Records he is the Son of Heaven who campaigns against the Quanrong; in the Tale of King Mu he is a traveller driving eight steeds ten thousand li west to meet the Queen Mother. Open any of these gold-ringed nodes and the two records sit side by side.