Why is it so hard to find dragons in modern Chinese mythologies? Insights from Manchu/Jurchen mythologies
All these years, there has been a mystery in my head: Dragon appears to be a key component of modern Chinese culture, but there is practically zero mythology about dragon in Chinese culture! This is in fact wild if you think about it, and the most possible answer is that the dragon concept came from somewhere else, where there are in fact systematic mythologies about what dragons do. This became clearer as I have started to read mythologies in the Manchu / Jurchen traditions, which are largely oral (as it is for many north Asian traditions): It talks about what dragons do . For example, it talks about that during the flood (lol just so common in human mythologies) Abka-Hehe (the Manchu creation goddess) turned her hairs into dragons that drink the water on the ground . Some of them turned into rivers, and some of these dragons were trying to find their ways back to the sea, and created valleys as they were wiggling towards the sea. In this case, there is a clear story about what...