The gourd that saved humanity

This is Lei Kung/Lei Gong, The Lord of Thunder from Chinese folk mythology...Again...

Did you know that he was the guy who caused "The flood"? You can read about it in "Chinese mythology A to Z"... 

The one that killed all the people except Fuxi and Nüwa, brother and sister who then became the progenitors of the new human race...

BTW, did you notice that they are holding a square and a compass...I wrote talked about this in my post about Father Sky and Mother Earth...And square and compasses, their symbols...I talked about them in my post "Square and compasses"...

Apparently the father of Fuxi and Nüwa, who is in some legends identified as Lei Gong himself, decided to catch Lei Gong and pickle him 🙂 And catch him he did, using a pitchfork, and he put him in a metal cage that hang under the roof...

The father then went to town to buy spices for pickling 🙂 and he told his kids not to give Lei Gong any food or water...Remember Lei Gong was a "bat like monster"...So the whole thing to me looks like something from Gremlins 🙂

Anyway, after Lei Gong begged them and begged them, the kids eventually did give him one drop of water. As soon as the water touched his lips, Lei Gong burst out of the cage with a terrifying bellow. See, Gremlins 🙂 Or Baš Čelik from Serbian fairytales...

The kids cowered in fear, but the god, instead of harming them, thank them for freeing him. Then he took out one of his teeth and gave it to the kids saying that if they plant it "it will grow into a gourd". And then he went off thundering and the rain started to fall...

The kids of course planted the tooth immediately to see what happens. And lo and behold, it immediately started to grown and soon turned into a giant gourd...

When their father came home, the place was already a swamp. WTF happened here? asked the father, and the kids told him everything. After hearing what happened, their father built a boat, got the kids and the gourd into the boat, put the kids into the gourd, and began to row...

The waters rose and rose and soon reached the heaven. The father of Fuxi and Nüwa started to bang on the heavenly door, begging the Lord of Heaven to end the rain and flood before they all drowned...

The Lord of Heaven, fearing that the flood will submerge the heaven itself, ordered the water god to get rid of the water...And so he did...But too fast. And so the boat fell to the ground, the father died from impact, and only Fuxi and Nüwa survived protected inside the gourd...

The rest is X-rated history...To me the interesting bit here is "the gourd"...Look, 18th c. Chinese white jade gourd-shaped vase with bats and clouds, Qianlong...

 

Hmmm...Bats, symbol of the peak of the rain season in China, and (rain) clouds...Maybe here would be a good place for you to take a detour and read through my earlier post about "Lei Kung (Lei Gong)", and all his mad animal and plant calendar markers...The important bit about bats:

What is the link between thunder (god) and bats? Temperate zone bat year is divided into two halves: active (Apr/May-Oct/Nov) and hibernation (Oct/Nov-Apr/May). The most noticeable event during the active period, bat swarming, starts in the middle of the active period, in Aug.

This is climatic year in China in Xian, Hunan, Sechuan...

And this is the thunderstorm frequency chart...

We can see that this is also the peak of the thunderstorm and rain season...So no wonder Thunder God was seen as the "bat like demon"...

But this post is about gourds...The bottle gourd, has a long history in China. Describing the way of life among Chinese farmers 3,000 years ago, the Pinfeng chapter of the Book of Odes relates: "In July, the gourds are in abundant supply, but by August, the season is over"

HA!!! When are gourds harvested? Jul/Aug. Right bang at the peak of the rain, thunderstorm and flood season in China...Caused by Lei Gong/Lei Kung, The Bat Dude...

Pickled bats? 🤮

That's it folks, that's all I have to say about The Lord of Thunder...

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...

Gourd pottery

This is an example of a "Dark Faced Burnished Ware", the earliest form of pottery developed in the western world...This bowl is from Shir, in Syria and was dated to c. 7000 BC. 

Interestingly, this almost spherical vessel looks very much like a clay version of one of these:

And each one of these vessels is made of one these: a bottle gourd.

And gourd is what pre pottery, pre metal, pre glass people used for making vessels and utensils for handling cold liquids...Well people continued to use gourd for the same purpose even after pottery, metal and glass were invented. My grandparents had loads of things like these...

Now back to the original Dark faced burnished ware vessel. How was it made? Did people use a gourd vessel as a mould? Basically plastering the clay on the outside of the gourd vessel and then firing it all together? Gourd would combust leaving just a ceramic crust (pot)?

The oldest pots ever made were made in Asia, about 20,000 years ago. They look like someone plastered an inside of a basket and then fired the whole thing together. Basket burned away, leaving basket shaped and patterned vessel. I wrote about it in my post "Basket pottery":  

Interestingly, the vessels made in Syria before the "Dark faced burnished ware", in 9th millennium BC, are known as "White ware". They are crumbly form of proto-pottery made from white plaster kind of mixture and then just air or sun dried. Don't they look like plastered baskets?

So we know that Pre Pottery Neolithic Syrians knew how to make plaster, and that they possibly used some kind of basket mould for making their White ware vessels...So it is possible that eventually someone made a "plaster" that when accidentally burned turned hard and black...

What was the first product of this newly discovered technology was something like this. Selection of pots and bowls from Tell Sabi Abyad (ca. 6600-6200 B.C.), among the earliest pottery currently known from Syria...Again very sack, basket like, right? 

What I find absolutely amazing, is that before people of Neolithic Syria discovered how to make proper clay pots, in the 8th millennium BC, they were making things like this: A bowl made from stone, calcite alabaster...From Met museum

This whole thing is a great example of two things: 
1. How people "invent" by trying to imitate nature
2. How skill and technology are so very different.

Which brings me to the question: what should we use for judging cultural development? Aesthetics or technology? Because they don't always match...Just look at the last two pictures...