关键词: 黄帝神话, 思想意蕴, 建构路径, 生成动因

Abstract:

The important stage in the evolution and stereotyping of the myth of the Yellow Emperor was from the pre-Qin period to the early Western Han period. In the pre-Zhou period and the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty, the myth of the Yellow Emperor was a cultural reminiscence, focusing on the imagination of his divinity and natural attributes. In the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods, the scholars, out of their ideological motivation of “learning from the past to understand the present”, adopted the paths of fictionalization, concordance, and reinterpretation of the classics to portray the Yellow Emperor as a wizard, a man, a god, and an immortal, resulting in the flourishing spectacular with “hundreds of schools’ discourses on the Yellow Emperor”. Whereas, the importance attached by the Warring States scholars to the reconstruction of ancient history prompted the Yellow Emperor to shed his mythological hue and become an earthly saint aided by his four ministers or seeking talents around the world, which was an important step in the transformation of the myth of the Yellow Emperor into the legend of ancient history. Against the background of political unification and ideological pluralism in the Han Dynasty, Sima Qian, following his predecessors and taking the paths of disenchantment and re-enchantment, reconstructed the multiple identities of the Yellow Emperor such as the bloodline progenitor, the first emperor, and the mythological images respectively. Since then, the Yellow Emperor has been widely and persistently revered as the progenitor of the Chinese bloodline and the first emperor in history. We should primarily examine the mythological ideologies and cultural values embodied in the mythological system of the Yellow Emperor.

Key words: myth of the Yellow Emperor, ideological implications, paths of construction, motivation of generation