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Concept
Nüwa
Summary
Nüwa, also read Nügua, is a mother goddess, culture hero, and/or member of the Three Sovereigns of Chinese mythology. She is a god in Chinese folk religion and Taoism. She is credited with creating humanity and repairing the Pillar of Heaven.
As creator of mankind, she molded humans individually by hand with yellow clay. In other stories where she fulfills this role, she only created nobles and/or the rich out of yellow soil. The stories vary on the other details about humanity's creation, but it was a tradition commonly believed in ancient China that she created commoners from brown mud. A story holds that she was tired when she created "the rich and the noble", so all others, or "cord-made people", were created from her "dragg[ing] a string through mud".
In the Huainanzi, there is described a great battle between deities that broke the pillars supporting Heaven and caused great devastation. There was great flooding, and Heaven had collapsed. Nüwa was the one who patched the holes in Heaven with five colored stones, and she used the legs of a tortoise to mend the pillars.
There are many instances of her in literature across China which detail her in creation stories, and today, she remains a figure important to Chinese culture.
The character nü () is a common prefix on the names of goddesses. The proper name is wa, also read as gua (). The Chinese character is unique to this name. Birrell translates it as 'lovely', but notes that it "could be construed as 'frog', which is consistent with her aquatic myth. In Chinese, the word for 'whirlpool' is wo (), which shares the same pronunciation with the word for 'snail' (). These characters all have their right side constructed by the word wa (), which can be translated as 'spiral' or 'helix' as noun, and as 'spin' or 'rotate' when as verb, to describe the 'helical movement'. This mythical meaning has also been symbolically pictured as compasses in the hand which can be found on many paintings and portraits associated with her.
Her reverential name is Wahuang ().
Official source
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