CHINA’S SACRED TURTLEBYDAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
The Chinese magic turtle is a peculiar sacred animal. The dragon, the phoenix, and the unicorn are sacred as well, but only the turtle can be seen by everyone to this very day.
Turtles naturally have a relatively long life. People in prehistoric China, for instance, spoke of a thousand-year-old giant turtle. Parents told their children, and they told their children and so on down the line. When people learned to write, they wrote about the virtually immortal turtle.
Children become aware of some of the turtle's virtues from direct observation. The turtle is amphibious - it can survive in or out of water. It has a hard, protective shell or house into which it can withdraw its vulnerable head. It has a wise, careful way of walking. It is very stable - it will not flip over easily. And of course some children like turtle soup.China would not exist today without the turtle's mythical stability. You see, Gong Gong the giant troublemaker butted his head into mountains and knocked them down. The falling mountains ripped big holes in the heavens, causing the sky to tilt; water poured through the holes, flooding the Earth. As if that were not bad enough, fires ravaged the dry areas. Most of people drowned, or starved to death because the crops were destroyed.Nu Wa, or Earth Mother, the goddess who created human beings from mud, came to the rescue. She melted colored rocks obtained from the river and used the metal derived from the molten mass as glue to patch up the holes in the sky, stopping the leaks. And she found a huge turtle, cut off its legs and used them to hold up the sky, making it level again, thus preventing water from flooding the southern countryside. But some folks say the sky had collapsed into such a final shape that Nu Wa only had to cut off one foot of a giant turtle, using it to prop up the northern part of the sky slightly higher than the rest, in order to keep the water flowing south at just the right rate suitable for agriculture. They claim that a giant turtle is wandering around in the northern sky, looking for its missing appendage. According to another popular myth, several islands were placed on the backs of turtles eons ago. Wise beings, called the Immortals, or White Souls, lived on the islands even before they were put on turtles. The White Souls were immortal because they had eaten a special herb growing on the islands, the Herb of Immortality. They were white or 'transparent' because they had cast off their skins like snakes. Moreover, all the animals on the islands were pure white. The mythical islands are known as the Blessed Isles or the Isles of the Immortals. The Immortals lived a life of luxury in houses of gold and jade. Island fruits - pearls and precious gems - were delicious to the eye if not to the mouth. The plant actually eaten by the Immortals, The Herb of Immortality, gave them the power of levitation, enabling them to visit all of the Blessed Isles. This researcher searched for the Herb of Immortality on Oahu a few years ago, but to no avail. Perhaps the Herb is cultivated somewhere on the Big Island (Hawaii). A local myth has it that some sort of magical herb is secretly grown in an area called Puna on Hawaii. The butter is called Puna Butter, or "the butter of the gods." Mythologists may want to venture over to Big Island one day, where they might discover, bake and eat some of the herb, and as a result see the Immortals as well as the sacred animals for themselves. The stability of turtles is obvious, but if we look at the turtle's shell we can divine a lot more than we might think. Indeed, almost everything we need to know is embedded on the turtle's shell as if the turtle were an oracle, so to speak. Long ago, after a certain turtle was killed and eaten, wise men asked the tortoise shell questions, such as, "What is going to happen in the future? What can wqe do about it?"
Strange as this might seem, Gun's dead body did not rot for three years because the spirit of his unborn son was inside the corpse, keeping it fresh. The Supreme Sovereign wondered why the body was not decaying. He had one of his gods cut it open with a magic sword. A dragon flew out of the body and circled up to Heaven - the dragon was Gun's son, Yu.When Yu arrived in Heaven, he asked the Supreme Sovereign for some Growing Soil so he could continue with his father's work and save humankind from the flood. The Supreme Sovereign capitulated, agreeing that it was high time to save humankind, and Yu got the Growing Soil. After he arrived on Earth with the dirty substance, he worked so hard to save everyone that one side of his body shriveled up.
Mind you that Yu did not work alone: he had two assistants. One assistant was a dragon, who dragged his tail around, cutting out the riverbeds and valleys so the floodwaters could drain away and help grow things. The other assistant was, of course, the turtle, who carried the Growing Soil on its back so Yu could use it to make mountains. Yu knew how to lay everything out because the plan for his whole project was spelled out on the turtle's back - the map indicated the right places for mountains, dams and rivers.Some people believe there is no truth to the fantastic story about Gun, his son Yu, and Yu's turtle. But we tend to believe it. Not only is it written on the old turtle's back, it is written in the stars as well. Surely when everyone learns how to read the turtle's back and the stars, they will know the truth about everything they need to know. Astrologers speak of the Black Turtle or Heavenly Turtle, the heavenly marker for the winter quadrant. They also mention Gun, the appellation for Corona Australis. No doubt the tail of Scorpius is the tail of the Responsive Dragon.