Nüwa Theory of Consciousness: Mending the Heavens in the Ice Age

TL;DR

• Nüwa’s myth may encode real events from ~12,000 years ago. Chinese traditions depict Nüwa – a serpent-bodied goddess – repairing a shattered sky and ending a great flood, themes that align with global flood legends likely rooted in the catastrophic glacial melts at the end of the Ice Age.
• Comparative mythologists see ancient echoes. Michael Witzel notes that stories of creation, a world-destroying flood, and a heroic serpent/dragon-slayer recur across Eurasia and the Americas – including Nüwa “slaying the black dragon” in China – suggesting a common Paleolithic origin for these myths.
• Nüwa’s deeds mirror a prehistoric transition. In Chinese lore, Nüwa creates humanity from clay and saves the world by smelting five-colored stones to mend Heaven, cutting a giant turtle’s legs to prop up the sky, and killing a black dragon to stop the flood. This can be read as a shamanic leader guiding her people out of chaos – literally ending “the great winter” and floods – into a new era of order and stability.
• Evolutionary evidence hints at a mental shift. Ancient DNA studies show genetic markers for schizophrenia risk were higher in humans 10,000+ years ago and then steadily selected against. Early post-Ice Age humans may have often experienced hallucinations or “bicameral” mindstates. Nüwa’s mythic role in “repairing” heaven and quelling chaos might symbolize humanity achieving a more integrated, self-reflective consciousness (a psychological sky made whole).
• Serpents and female wisdom bridge cultures. Nüwa and her brother Fuxi are portrayed with intertwined snake-tails, holding a compass and square – symbols of Heaven and Earth – to re-order the world. This imagery recalls the biblical Eve and her serpent: in both East and West, a serpent-associated woman figures prominently in humanity’s first awakening to knowledge. Nüwa’s compass and Fuxi’s square even anticipate the “heaven-round, earth-square” motif later echoed in Western sacred geometry and Freemasonry.

Paleolithic Mythology in Chinese Memory#

Humanity’s oldest stories often preserve surprising memories of the deep past. The Chinese creation goddess Nüwa (女娲) is a prime example – a figure whose legends contain motifs so ancient and widespread that scholars trace them back to the Paleolithic. Harvard professor Michael Witzel’s comparative study of world mythologies identifies recurring “Laurasian” myth elements: creation of the world, generations of gods, a flood catastrophe, and a heroic dragon-slayer, among others. Nüwa’s tale fits this pattern uncannily well. In fact, The Huainanzi (circa 2nd century BCE) records that after a heaven-rending calamity, Nüwa melted down five-colored stones to patch the sky, cut off a giant turtle’s legs to set up the four pillars, and “killed the black dragon to save the people of Jizhou,” finally piling reed ashes to stem the floodwaters. In one mythical stroke, she repairs cosmic order and rescues humanity.

Such imagery – a collapsing sky, a world engulfed by flood, a serpentine monster vanquished – is not unique to China. It resonates with flood myths and dragon-slayer stories from around the globe. Witzel points out that flood myths are nearly universal and extraordinarily old: they appear in both his “Laurasian” category (myths of Eurasia and the Americas) and the ostensibly separate “Gondwanan” traditions of Africa and Australia. In other words, even cultures that split tens of thousands of years ago share a memory of a world-destroying flood survived by a few lucky ancestors. Chinese myth preserves this memory not only in Nüwa’s story but also in the tale of her successors Fu Xi, Yao, Shun, and Yu – culture heroes who deal with floods. A modern Chinese folklorist notes that “in the earliest era of Chinese myth, a catastrophic flood left an indelible mark on our ancestors’ collective memory.” Ancient geologic reality backs this up: around 12,000 years ago, as the last Ice Age ended, melting glaciers caused sea levels and water volumes to surge, inundating vast lands. It’s now widely thought that prehistoric peoples worldwide witnessed these cataclysms – spawning oral accounts that evolved into the flood myths we know. The story of Nüwa “mending Heaven” to end the flood can thus be read as a mythologized memory of the world returning to stability after the post-glacial deluge.

Crucially, Chinese tradition places Nüwa at the very dawn of civilization – the “original ancestor” who both creates humanity and saves it. As a culture hero, she is credited with shaping people from clay (like a primordial artist or potter) and even with inventing marriage to ensure humans could reproduce in an ordered way. Some legends say that after a great flood, Nüwa and her brother Fuxi were the only survivors; the two then married and re-founded the human race (a scenario strikingly parallel to flood-survivor pairs in other mythologies). Early sources such as the Chu Ci poems (4th century BCE) already described Nüwa as a human-headed, snake-bodied deity. Far from being a later patriotic invention, she appears to be part of the most ancient stratum of myth – perhaps dating back to when early hunter-gatherers in Asia first began pondering existence. Witzel and others go so far as to suggest that Nüwa, the serpent-tailed “Mother” of Chinese lore, shares a common origin with creator goddesses and flood matriarchs around the world.

It’s telling that even in remote corners of the Americas, which were peopled by migrants from Asia during the Ice Age, one finds analogous tales: for example, some Native American stories feature a female figure who survives a global flood or a snake-goddess associated with creation. The broad parallels hint that these myths did not arise in isolation but stem from deeply ancient experiences of natural disaster and salvation. Nüwa’s saga, then, can be seen as a Chinese reflection of a Pan-human story: how the world nearly ended in water, and how an ancestral hero(ine) helped humanity begin anew.

The Great Flood at the End of the Ice Age#

Chinese mythology preserves multiple flood narratives, but Nüwa’s flood is positioned at the very beginning of time – essentially a primordial deluge. Later chronicles like Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian and folk collections record that Nüwa and Fuxi survived a devastating flood by sheltering in a gourd or boat, then repopulated the desolate world as the first couple¹. This motif of a sibling-pair or family surviving a flood appears in Mesopotamia (Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh), the Bible (Noah’s ark), India (Manu’s boat), and dozens of indigenous legends across Australia and the Americas. The Chinese Hun and Miao peoples, for instance, have ancient songs of a brother and sister surviving a flood in a drum or vessel and becoming the ancestors of humanity. All these tales likely reference the end of the Pleistocene glaciation, when rising seas and colossal floods would have been seared into cultural memory.

Notably, Chinese scholars in the early 20th century also theorized about flood myths’ Ice Age origins. Anthropologist Liu Lian in 1923 argued that if Chinese flood myths were not borrowed from the Middle East, they must derive from “rumors of the post-glacial floods of the Fourth Ice Age”. Today’s science supports this: sea levels rose dramatically (~120 meters) between 12,000–8000 BCE, submerging land bridges and coastal plains. The legends of “water covering all the land” are poetic exaggerations of these real events. In Nüwa’s case, the myth says the sky itself collapsed and “water poured down unchecked,” drowning the land until she acted. One interpretation is that a meteorological or astronomical event (the mythic battle of the water god Gonggong and fire god Zhurong) caused heaven’s orderly functions to fail – possibly a metaphor for climate chaos at the Ice Age’s end. Nüwa’s repairs then restore cosmic balance, which could correspond to the stabilization of climate and sea levels in the early Holocene, allowing agriculture and villages to develop in China by 7000–5000 BCE.

Even the “black dragon” Nüwa slays can be linked to flood waters. Dragons in Chinese lore are water creatures, often rain-makers or flood-bringers. The Huainanzi explicitly says Nüwa “killed the black dragon to save Jizhou (the central plains)”, after which she stopped the inundation. A black dragon in a deluge context likely symbolizes a particularly dreadful water serpent or flood-causing monster – essentially the flood itself personified. We see similar symbolism elsewhere: Mesopotamian myth has Tiamat, a primordial water-dragon, defeated to create the world; the Biblical flood is followed by God’s promise (the rainbow) that the “waters” or sea-dragon will never again cover Earth. It is intriguing that Nüwa’s dragon is black – black often connoting the north or darkness in Chinese five-color symbolism, and also the element of water (e.g. the Black Tortoise Xuanwu is a northern water deity). Thus the “black dragon” could encode the idea of the end of the long dark winter (the glacial epoch) and the vanquishing of uncontrolled waters. By slaying it, Nüwa makes the world safe for humans once more. Chinese mythologists consider Hundun (Chaos) and Gonggong (the rebel water god) as earlier personifications of floods and disorder; Nüwa’s triumph over the dragon continues this theme of imposing order on formless turmoil.

From a cultural-memory standpoint, the myth of Nüwa’s flood tells us that early Chinese storytellers remembered a time “before the sky was fixed,” when fire raged incessantly and floods never abated. Such images aren’t far off from what we know of Pleistocene’s end: raging wildfires (as ecosystems underwent rapid warming) and megafloods from glacial lakes would have plagued those millennia. The fact that Nüwa is cast as intervening to fix these problems suggests a human-centric optimism: our ancestors imagined that a benevolent agent (a goddess, or by extension human ingenuity) could master nature’s fury. In the Nüwa myth, after she patches the sky and drains the flood, “the world returns to peace and the people survive”. It is essentially a story of rebirth after apocalypse – precisely the kind of morale-boosting narrative a community would cherish if their forebears endured real cataclysms.

Repairing the Sky: Shamanic Leadership in a Fractured World#

Beyond its physical aspects, Nüwa’s legend can be read as a spiritual or psychological allegory of humanity’s awakening. In the myth, the fabric of Heaven itself is broken – a profound metaphor for a rupture in the cosmic order or in human consciousness. Nüwa takes it upon herself to “fix” this rupture. Scholars have noted that many creation myths double as “phenomenological accounts of the first man or woman to think ‘I am’”. Could Nüwa represent those first glimmers of reflective consciousness emerging after ages of chaos?

Consider Nüwa’s actions in shamanic terms: she uses ritual craft (smelting magical stones, an almost alchemical act) to heal the sky, and she slays a poisonous dragon that had been terrorizing the land. This is the archetype of the primeval shaman – a healer of the world, battling demons that others cannot see. In many cultures, shamans are believed to journey to the sky or underworld to restore balance when the community is in crisis. Nüwa essentially journeys to Heaven (by re-creating its foundation) and subdues an Underworld beast (the dragon) to save her people. It’s not hard to imagine that during the unstable climate of the Paleolithic-Holocene transition, charismatic leaders or shamans arose, claiming to “repair the sky” and stop the floods through rituals. Nüwa might encode the memory of such a figure (or collective of figures) who guided early society through environmental and psychic upheaval.

Interestingly, evidence from genetics suggests our ancestors themselves were undergoing internal change in this period. A recent ancient DNA study of thousands of human genomes in Europe found that over the last ~10,000 years, there was strong natural selection against alleles associated with schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders. In plainer terms: late Ice Age and early Holocene humans had a higher genetic propensity for schizophrenic-like traits (such as hallucinations or disordered thinking), and these traits have been progressively weeded out in the millennia since. Some anthropologists connect this to the idea of the “bicameral mind” – the hypothesis (notably advanced by Julian Jaynes) that early human consciousness was less integrated, with people perhaps experiencing what we’d call auditory hallucinations (externalized “voices of gods”) rather than a singular introspective self. If there is truth to that, then the dawn of self-reflective consciousness – the point when humans developed an introspective “I” – might indeed have been a tumultuous transition.

It’s tantalizing to interpret Nüwa’s myth in this light. When “Heaven breaks” and chaos ensues, it could symbolize the breakdown of an old mental world. Nüwa’s act of “smelting the five-colored stones” to mend the sky could correspond to integrating a new, multi-faceted perception of reality (five colors evoking a complete spectrum, perhaps a metaphor for wholeness of mind). Killing the black dragon might equate to conquering the inner demons or hallucinations that plagued the earlier mindset. And using ash to stop the flood may signify a practical solution – grounding the emotions, applying “earth” to sop up the overwhelming “water” of primal fear. In the end, Heaven and Earth are set right, and humanity can thrive once more. This is essentially the establishment of a new equilibrium – which could be read as the establishment of modern consciousness.

While such an interpretation is speculative, it resonates with the Eve Theory of Consciousness proposed by cognitive researcher Andrew Cutler. Cutler’s thesis holds that “women discovered ‘I’ first and then taught men about inner life”, and that creation myths are “memories of when women forged humans into a dualistic (self-aware) species.”. In many mythologies, a female figure is associated with gifting knowledge or soul to humanity (Eve eating the fruit, Pandora opening the box, a goddess breathing life into clay figures, etc.). Nüwa falls exactly into this role – a mother figure crafting humans and arguably educating humanity by instituting norms (marriage, repairs, saving lives). It’s tempting to see Nüwa as an ancient recollection of real women in the Paleolithic who were culture-bearers or shamans guiding their tribes through the “mind upgrade” of self-conscious thought. In this vein, Nüwa “teaching” Fuxi (her brother/husband) and working alongside him could mirror a scenario where women were the first to master language, ritual, or herbal medicines (like psychoactives) that expanded the mind, and then partnered with men to establish a new societal order².

The shamanic aspect of Nüwa’s myth is supported by ritual elements: She performs a sacrifice of sorts (slaying the dragon, an act often allegorical for offering or overcoming a powerful spirit) and uses artifice (forging magical stones) – much like how shamans use symbolic objects and enact cosmic battles in trance. Notably, some scholars speculate that psychoactive substances (perhaps snake venom or plant elixirs) could have been employed in ancient rituals to induce altered states that facilitated introspection. Cutler suggests the serpent in Eden – and by extension serpent figures globally – might hint at such hallucinogenic “communion” that granted knowledge of self. Nüwa’s serpentine form and her triumph over a venomous dragon align with this motif: the serpent is both a source of wisdom and something to be overcome or mastered. By “mastering” the serpent (slaying the dragon), Nüwa could symbolize humanity integrating the profound, and perhaps dangerous, insights that came with the first consciousness-expanding experiences.

In short, Nüwa’s repairing of Heaven can be read as both a literal rescue of the physical world and a metaphorical healing of the human psyche. After the “sky” is fixed, humans are no longer at the mercy of overwhelming natural forces or inner voices – they can live in a world that makes sense, under a sky that doesn’t leak chaos. Little wonder that later ages deified Nüwa as the Patroness of healers and matchmakers, and even into modern times “Nüwa spirit” is invoked to describe selfless acts of saving others. The ancient myth carries the memory of a time when to save the world was also to shape what it meant to be human.

Serpent, Woman, and the Square-Compass: Linking Nüwa to Eve#

One of the most striking elements of Nüwa’s iconography is her serpentine form. In classical depictions, Nüwa and Fuxi both have human upper bodies with long twining dragon-tails in place of legs. Often these tails are intertwined, and in later Han Dynasty art (2nd century CE) the pair are shown holding a compass (Nüwa) and a square or ruler (Fuxi). At first glance, the image is purely Chinese, reflecting the cosmology of “round heaven and square earth” – Nüwa’s compass draws the circle of the sky, Fuxi’s carpenter square measures out the four corners of the earth. Together, the entwined serpent-couple literally connect heaven and earth, imposing order (规矩, guījǔ) on the formless world by establishing the cardinal directions, the calendar (sun and moon often appear beside them), and societal norms. It’s a beautiful embodiment of yin and yang: female and male working in harmony to create a balanced cosmos.

Curiously, this compass-and-square motif has a counterpart in the Western symbolic tradition. The emblem of the Freemasons – a fraternity that values geometry and moral order – is none other than the compass and square, joined together. The Masonic interpretation is that the square represents earthly virtues (integrity, truth) and the compass represents the circle of heaven or spiritual insight. This is strikingly similar to the Chinese understanding of Nüwa’s and Fuxi’s tools as harmonizing heaven and earth. There is no direct connection between ancient Chinese tomb art and modern Masonry, of course; rather, the parallel underscores how universal these symbols are. A compass and a square are basic implements in building – to “square” something is to set it right, and to “draw a circle” is to encompass and integrate. It seems many cultures independently arrived at seeing these tools as metaphors for creating order out of chaos. In the case of Nüwa, we have one of the earliest known instances of this symbolism: by Han times, texts explicitly commented that Fuxi “established the square (earth)” and Nüwa “established the round (heaven)”. The art from that era shows them actively using the tools (often with a celestial sun and moon above), implying that the very structure of the world – space and time – was set in place by this serpent couple.

This imagery resonates with the Genesis story of Adam and Eve in provocative ways. In the Bible, it is Eve (enticed by a serpent) who initiates humanity’s leap into knowledge – a move that breaks the static order of Eden but ushers in the human world as we know it (with self-awareness, morality, and eventually civilization). Western art sometimes illustrated Eden with Adam and Eve flanking the Tree (symbol of knowledge), around which the serpent coils. We have here another primal trio of man, woman, and serpent at the center of a creation narrative. In Eden, the serpent is a tempter that causes a “fall”; in China, the serpent-bodied Nüwa is a savior who restores heaven – yet both can be seen as agents of transformation. Gnostic and esoteric interpretations of Genesis even cast the snake in a positive light, as a bringer of gnosis (knowledge) rather than a villain, which aligns more with Nüwa’s role as a benefactor. It is fascinating that some Chinese sources list “Adam and Eve” among the roles or analogues of Fuxi and Nüwa, explicitly drawing that cross-cultural parallel. The two myths may be mirror images: in the West, a woman and a snake together break humanity out of paradise (delivering consciousness with a side of suffering), while in the East, a woman who is half-snake rescues humanity from suffering, restoring the world. In both, humanity cannot remain in a naive, pre-conscious state – they must face a new reality, whether by expulsion from Eden or by surviving a cosmic flood.

The presence of the serpent is key. Anthropologically, snakes have been potent symbols of knowledge, life, and cyclical renewal since time immemorial (snakes shed their skins and often were thought to hold secret wisdom of immortality). In the context of consciousness evolution, Cutler’s Eve theory suggests that a “worldwide snake cult” could have been associated with the first awakenings of the soul. He even posits that perhaps psychedelic snake venom or rituals involving serpents played a role in communicating the concept of the self – hence later myths dimly recalling a snake in the garden or serpent deities that gift insight. While direct evidence for snake-induced hallucinations in the Paleolithic is scant, we do know that serpent worship was widespread. For example, a prehistoric rock carving in Botswana (dating over 70,000 years old) appears to depict a python and shows signs of ritual activity, hinting at one of the earliest known snake “cults”. And across indigenous Australia, the Rainbow Serpent is revered as the creator who brought law, language, and ritual – essentially civilizing the people at the end of Dreamtime. This strongly echoes Nüwa and Fuxi bringing order and culture to humanity, and again a serpent is at the heart of it.

It is against this cross-cultural backdrop that the Nüwa hypothesis emerges: the idea that Nüwa is a cultural memory of real events at the end of the Ice Age, including a leap in human consciousness. From the Chinese perspective, Nüwa is not just a random folktale but the very first chapter of human history – “the time when heaven and earth were sundered and then repaired.” If we treat that chapter as a mythologized record, we find it aligns with geological truth (a great flood around the end of the Pleistocene) and possibly with cognitive truth (the dawn of introspective thought). The elements of the story – a world catastrophe, a female savior, a snake/dragon conquered, new rules and structures established – all map to transitions in the human condition. When the great ice sheets melted, not only was the physical world remade, but human societies and minds were remade too. Nüwa, the snake-goddess, stands at that juncture, hammer and chisel (or rather compass and square) in hand, giving form to the new world.

In conclusion, viewing Nüwa through this multidisciplinary lens (mythology, geology, psychology, genetics) enriches our understanding of her. What might superficially seem like fanciful folklore could in fact be a 15,000-year-old story – a story so important that it was preserved in ritual and eventually written down. As Witzel observed, if any story were to survive across millennia, “it would be our genesis.” For the Chinese people, Nüwa’s tale is that genesis. It enshrines the idea that the human race was born not once but twice: first biologically, and then spiritually, through calamity and salvation. That second birth – the birth of human self-awareness and culture out of the “floodwaters” of a more chaotic past – may be what Nüwa truly represents. Her myth carries the torch of memory from the depths of the Ice Age, assuring us that even when the sky falls, it can be put back together. And intriguingly, it is the serpent mother who leads the way, forging order from chaos and guiding humanity into a new age of being.

FAQ#

Q1. Does Nüwa’s myth really date back to the Ice Age? A: We cannot know the exact age, but many scholars think key elements of Nüwa’s story (a world flood, a cosmic serpent/dragon) originate in the late Paleolithic era, around the end of the last Ice Age. The myth likely evolved over time, but its core motifs are shared with other ancient flood legends worldwide, hinting at a common prehistoric source.

Q2. What is the significance of Nüwa killing a “black dragon”? A: In Chinese myth the black dragon represents a water monster causing the catastrophic flood. Nüwa slaying it symbolizes halting the deluge and defeating chaos. Symbolically, this act could also mean overcoming the “dark” forces of disorder (or even internal demons) at the dawn of a new age – effectively ending the great darkness of the past (the glacial epoch or a less conscious state) so that orderly civilization could begin.

Q3. How do Nüwa and Fuxi compare to Adam and Eve? A: Both pairs are regarded as first ancestors of humanity, but their stories differ in tone. Nüwa and Fuxi are sibling-spouses who create and save humanity (Nüwa molds people from clay and repairs the broken world), whereas Adam and Eve are a couple who trigger humanity’s self-awareness (by transgressing in Eden). Intriguingly, a serpent is important in both narratives – beneficent in the Chinese version (as Nüwa herself is part-serpent) and trickster in the Eden version – linking women with transformative knowledge in each case.

Q4. Why do some theories say ancient humans were “more schizophrenic”? A: This comes from research in evolutionary psychology and genetics showing that genes associated with schizophrenia and related traits were more common millennia ago. Early humans likely experienced mental phenomena (like hearing inner voices or visions) more frequently, perhaps similar to shamanic trance or the “bicameral mind” hypothesis. Over time, natural selection reduced these traits as fully self-aware, modern consciousness became the norm. Myths like Nüwa’s – where a figure restores order and drives off madness (the dragon) – may symbolically reflect this stabilization of the human mind.

Q5. What do the compass and square that Nüwa and Fuxi hold represent? A: In Chinese tradition the compass (a circle-drawing tool) and the carpenters’ square (for right angles) represent Heaven and Earth respectively – encapsulating the idea “heaven is round, earth is square.” By holding these, Nüwa and Fuxi are shown as establishing cosmic order: Nüwa sets the dome of sky in place and Fuxi sets the corners of the earth. It’s a visual shorthand for them bringing harmony and structure to the world, turning chaos into a well-ruled cosmos (much like an engineer or architect of the universe).

Footnotes#

Sources#

1. Witzel, Michael. The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Oxford University Press, 2012. – Witzel’s comprehensive analysis of global myths identifies common patterns (Laurasian vs. Gondwanan myths) and suggests stories like Nüwa’s have prehistoric roots shared across continents.

2. Connor, Steve. “How did our legends really begin?” The Independent, July 29, 2014. – News article summarizing Witzel’s theory. Notes that flood myths (e.g. Noah’s deluge) likely date back ≈10–15,000 years and cites Nüwa’s dragon-slaying in the context of worldwide creation motifs.

3. 毕旭玲 (Bi, Xuling). “最早的中华洪水之神为什么叫『混沌』” (Why is the earliest Chinese flood god called ‘Hundun’?). 上观新闻 (Shanghai Observer), 21 Aug 2021. – Chinese article on flood myths. Explains that a global prehistoric flood ~12k years ago is recorded in all cultures’ myths, and that Chinese myth remembers it through figures like Hundun, Gonggong, and Nüwa.

4. Liu An et al. (Western Han Dynasty). Huainanzi (淮南子), “Lanming Xun” chapter. – Ancient Chinese text (~120 BCE) preserving the Nüwa story. Describes Nüwa mending the sky with melted stones, propping it up with a turtle’s legs, slaying a black dragon, and stopping the flood with ash, thereby saving the world (English translation in Records of Natural Philosophy, tr. He Yan, 2010).

5. Reich, David, Ali Akbari, et al. “Pervasive findings of directional selection realize the promise of ancient DNA to elucidate human adaptation.” bioRxiv preprint (Sep 15, 2024): 2024.09.14.613021. – Genomic study of 8,000+ ancient Eurasians. Reports significant Holocene selection against schizophrenia risk alleles and other behavioral traits, suggesting that psychological profiles of humans changed markedly in the last 10 millennia.

6. Cutler, Andrew. “Eve Theory of Consciousness v3.0: How humans evolved a soul.” Vectors of Mind (Substack essay), Feb 27, 2024. – Proposes that women were the first to attain self-awareness and communicated it ritually (possibly via snake symbolism). Posits that creation myths (Eve, Nüwa, etc.) are cultural memories of this cognitive revolution led by women.

7. Temple Study (Bryce Haymond). “Nüwa and Fuxi in Chinese Mythology: Compass & Square.” TempleStudy.com, Sept 17, 2008. – Blog discussing an ancient painting of Nüwa and Fuxi unearthed in Xinjiang. Highlights that Nüwa holds a compass and Fuxi a square, symbolizing the establishment of cosmic order (heaven and earth), and notes parallels drawn between Nüwa and figures like Noah and Eve.

8. Qin, Lu. “探源女娲补天，沸腾民族精神” (Exploring the origins of ‘Nüwa Mends the Sky’, igniting national spirit). Fengci Yu Youmo (People’s Daily Satire & Humor Weekly), 11 Mar 2022, p.5. – Reviews the Nüwa myth and its cultural significance. Confirms the myth’s details from Huainanzi and mentions that hundreds of global flood legends (from the Shan Hai Jing to the Bible) “seem to hint at the real existence of that prehistoric great flood.” The article interprets Nüwa’s story as ancient people recording their hardships in symbolic form and lauds the enduring “Nüwa spirit” of altruism.