DrChristinaMiuBingCheng.doc

Dr Christina Miu Bing Cheng Honorary Research Fellow Centre of Asian Studies The University of Hong Kong The paper was presented at the 17th Triennial Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, August 8-15, 2004, in Hong Kong. Matriarchy at the Edge The Mythic Cult of Nu Wa 女媧 in Macau Introduction The mythological repertoires of early Chinese culture and civilization are contained in a number of classical texts. These texts are invaluable sources to understand the power of mythological narratives, which re-enact and confound with the history of China, and which crucially foster cultural cohesion and a sense of collective identity. The mythological narratives, as Anne Birrell argues, are sacred narratives, chiefly because ‘they relate acts of the deities in addition to other episodes, and they embody the most deeply felt spiritual values of a nation’ (Birrell, 2000:7). In Macau—the former Portuguese enclave at the edge of South China, there is a small temple consecrated to Nu Wa 女媧. This were-snake Daoist goddess has been an influential deity since antiquity and played a pivotal role in Chinese mythical history. She represents Chinese culture’s cosmogony, or creation myth. Bits and pieces of Nu Wa’s portrayal as the primeval creator goddess and saviour of human life are narrated in various time-honoured classics, i.e. a Warring States Period (475—221 B.C.) text, Lie Zi 列子 (Master Lie) and two Han-dynasty (206 B.C.—220 A.D.) texts, Feng Su Tong Yi 風俗通義 (Comprehensive Interpretation of Customs) and Huai Nan Zi 淮南子 (Master Huai Nan). Apart from her matriarchal image as the Earth Mother, she is depicted as a beautiful but wrathful goddess in a Ming-dynasty (1368—1644) mythological narrative, Feng Shen Yan Yi 封神演義 (Creation of the Gods). Moreover, Cao Xueqin曹雪芹 (1717—1763) opens his masterpiece, Hung Lou Meng 紅樓夢 (The Dream of the Red Chamber), with a decisive reference to Nu Wa as the repairer of the sky. Amid an assortment of