Mirror with deities

Mirror with Deities, Chariot, and the White Tiger, China, Eastern Han dynasty, 100-200 AD...

The deities are The Queen Mother of the West - who is an embodiment of Yin (cold, dark, west) and The King Father of the East - who is an embodiment of Yang (hot, light, east)

These two are said to have created the humanity...

The Queen Mother of the West, representation of Yin (cold, dark, west) is associated with the tiger, the symbol of winter...Which is why the tiger is depicted on the mirror...

But no one knows why we have a chariot pulled by 4 horses supposedly associated with The King Father of the East, representation of Yang (hot, light, east)...According to the Cleveland museum of art...

So let me see if I can solve this mystery...

Apart from The King Father of the East, the Chinese also have The Dragon King of the East, also known as the Dragon God, who is a Chinese water and weather god...

Now if we look at the climate in the North Eastern China, where all these legends originate, the climatic year id divided into hot wet summer, and cold, dry winter...

Hot summer which is symbolised by a dragon (Yang) and cold winter which is symbolised by a tiger (Yin)...I explained why in my post about another "Eastern Han mirror"...

Ok, what does this have to do with horses on the original mirror? Remember my post about the "Three legged sun crows"? 

And the post about sun chariot pulled by "Longma", dragon horse?

Why dragon horse? Cause in China, the hot, wet season, when "dragon brings rain", coincides with the natural mating season of horses...Hence dragon-horse...

I talked about this dragons (and horses) in Chinese mythology in my posts "Chinese dragon", "Tiger and dragon", "Mythical beast from Xian"... 

So I think that knowing this, the chariot drawn by 4 horses is a perfect animal symbol for The King Father of the East, representation of Yang, hot, light...

BTW, doesn't all this reminds anyone of Helios... And this guy:

Depictions of the sun god in a horse drawn chariot. Silk paintings found in the funerary complexes at Dulan, Qinghai province, and Astana, Xinjiang province, China, dated to Tang dynasty (8th-9th century AD) 

So, nothing new and interesting here, right? 🙂 Well, until today, I could not understand why Yin was associated with the west and Yang was associated with the east...

Until I saw this thing: East asian monsoon blows hot from the south east during the summer, the time of (horse) dragon, Yang time, and blows cold from the north west during the winter, the time of tiger, Yin time...

Hence The Queen Mother of the West - who is an embodiment of Yin (cold, dark, west) and The King Father of the East - who is an embodiment of Yang (hot, light, east)...And tiger and horse drawn chariot...

That's it...

To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...