"The Great Pail"
Derivative Project
This is the author's first full-length novel set in exotic Central America. The "core character" of this book, the Feathered Serpent God, originated in the Yin and Shang Dynasties and was formerly known as "Yinglong". Another "behind-the-scenes figure" worth mentioning is Youhouxi. Three thousand years ago, the king of Youhou in the east led 250,000 survivors to flee to the sea because of his failure to succeed. After arriving in America, the Olmec civilization was established with the worship of Feathered Serpent as the spiritual axis. This novel takes this as the historical background and tells the legendary stories that happened in Central America in the eighteenth century.
The Great Pail
Story Summary
The story takes place in the tropical rainforest of Central America at the end of the 17th century. A mysterious tribe "Tizoke" from "Yindi" on the other side of the ocean has multiplied here for three thousand years and evolved into an independent round city "Tizoke" driven by a perpetual motion machine, commonly known as "Big Barrel". , lingering under the rule of the high priest Hopi. The high priest tampered with the ancient doctrine of Feathered Serpent God, created lies, ignorance and fear, and turned the entire city-state into a solid "siege".
With the help of his earthly incarnation, a family that spreads love, through the miracle of birth and death, Feathered Serpent tries to save this lonely city-state that is always spinning on itself, and help it escape the fate of tyranny and destruction. The kind-hearted spiritual guide, Moers, is the earthly son of Feathered Serpent, and has a beautiful family; his son Popoka is a technological genius, keen on making aircraft, and wants to escape from the closed city; his daughter Angie is born with Divinity and magic, was arrested by Hopi for inadvertently "creating visions", and was about to be burned to death as a witch, but she was safe and sound in the fire, showing rare miracles.
Hopi then changed her mind and shaped her into a "goddess of death", imprisoned in the temple, and accepted the peeping and worship of the residents, thereby strengthening her rule.
Moers tried to rescue his daughter through the vote of the elders. All the elders who supported him were poisoned, and his beloved wife Dana was also murdered in the hospital. The grieving Moers tried to rescue his daughter Angie from the temple, but she was bewitched by Hopi and killed her father by mistake. At this time, the Feathered Serpent God suddenly came and took away the body of Moers in the eyes of all the people.
Angie came to his senses, and with the encouragement of his father's old friend, Lao Baozi, he publicly exposed Hopi's crimes to the people. The people were awakened and revolted. "Barrel" restored justice to Feathered Serpent.
But the Mole Man family, which manages the underground perpetual motion machine, accepted a mysterious order, abandoned Tizok, and moved to the deepest part of the earth, and the perpetual motion machine stopped rotating ever since. The brothers and sisters Popoca and Angie also bid farewell to their hometown and went to the depths of the rainforest to have children there, avoiding the ultimate fate of the city-state of Tizoc being destroyed by the Spaniards.
The Great Pail noun list
【Tizok】A circular city in the middle of the Central American rainforest sits on a super perpetual motion machine whose outer ring spins like a clock. With hundreds of years of history, it believes in the Feathered Serpent God and is basically isolated from the outside world.
【Feathered snake god】The main god believed by the Tizoke people, the patron saint of Tizoke City, is in charge of life and birth, and is the spiritual pillar of the residents of the city.
【Perpetual motion machine】The technological core of Tizok City, the source of its technology is unknown. Managed by the Lorenzo family, its true structure is hidden underground and remains unknown to this day. In 1963, it was ranked first among the "Top Ten Suspenseful Buildings in America" by El Universal, Mexico.
【Guide】A profession that specializes in soul guidance for the dying is one of the most important spiritual affairs in Tizoke City, because it represents the Feathered Serpent God's care for life.
【High Priest】The management of Tizok is a structure that combines politics and religion, and the priesthood is responsible for the worship of Feathered Serpent God, as well as the research, interpretation and dissemination of related theology. The high priest is the leader of this group and has supreme power.
【Presbyterian Church】Consisting of the aristocratic class, it decides the important affairs of Tizok by voting, but its structure is fragile, and it can only survive under the pressure of the priests.
Historical Analysis of Chinese Characters:
The origin of Chinese characters in the framework of civilization
The Dichotomy of Cultural Anthropology
Two British and American old men, Toynbee and Huntington, started the debate on the grand narrative of civilization. This is undoubtedly a deconstruction of human history, which has triggered a new wave of historical standardization. As the elite members of human beings, the intellectuals have declared without shame that they have the powerful ability to draw a line with the humble animal kingdom, that is, they have found the four great signs that distinguish humans from animals.
The best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari claimed in "A Brief History of Human Beings" that walking upright, having a larger brain capacity, using fire (becoming the earliest cook in the biological world and the inventor of the dark night culture), and being good at socializing are all important. It is the main scale for human beings to differentiate themselves from the animal kingdom, and it is also the four magic weapons for human beings to climb to the top of the biological chain. Although this classification method is crude and uninnovative, it is enough to satisfy the cognitive hunger of the scientifically illiterate public.
This kind of standardized operation can also be repeated in the writing of human history. When people need to name some human historical activities in ancient times, they will use "culture" to name them. For example, historians call the remains of human activities discovered in the Yangshao area "Yangshao Culture". And there are four standards to measure this "culture" -
The first is to have pantheistic religious beliefs and have professionals such as priests and wizards; the second is to master a complex language system and be able to use this language to start a dialogue with gods/humans; the third is to have mobility/settlement The gathering villages and houses with vegetation/stone materials; the fourth is the use of stone and pottery tools, stone tools tend to be more detailed, and there is a differentiation of tools and decorative functions, and it is possible to fire wheeled pottery (especially painted pottery), And make it an important commodity in regional trade.
After the "culture" continued to move forward, people finally waited for the great thing called "civilization". The lonely fireball on the ground slowly illuminates the wise faces of human beings.
Green Daniel proposed three signs to measure civilization. The first is writing, whether it is pure pictographic or pictographic/phonetic double-material writing; the second is the emergence of large-scale cities, even with tall terraces, stairs and city walls. And it can accommodate more than 5,000 residents; the third is the ritual building that forms a system, such as the pyramids of Egypt and Maya; Japanese and Chinese scholars also add a fourth sign, which is the metal manufacturing system marked by bronze casting (mining, smelting and casting technology), this "three plus one" system, has become the basic tableware that people use to taste history.
This is actually the three "globalization" processes in the history of early human evolution. In the first stage of "gene seeding period", the great migration from Africa achieved the great goal of Homo sapiens globalization; and in the second stage of "painted pottery seeding period", human beings promoted The wave of globalization of painted pottery. In the third stage of the "bronze seeding period", human beings completed the process of bronze globalization by means of escape and trade. Without these three baptisms of "globalization", the cultural miracle of the "Axial Age" would not have occurred. (Click here to read the full article)
