Chinese Myths Of Totemism And Shuowen Jiezi

Myth represents the essence of archaic religion and life. Chinese myths preserve the original form in principle, so they could be regarded as reliable research materials. According to Chinese myths, the grapheme, meaning and cultural information of related Chinese characters in Shuowen Jiezi could be analyzed scientifically.Chapter 2 and 3 separately analyze related Chinese characters in Shuowen Jiezi from totemic Gansheng and Ancestor's name, the totemic idol. Such myths give a magnitude effect in the process of explaining the meanings of Chinese characters in Shuowen Jiezi. On one hand, Xushen correctly open out the cultural information of the characters with the help of those myths. On the other hand, the myths affect Xushen to comprehend the original meaning of them.There are two aspects of advantages to use myths of totemism kept in ancient books to research Shuowen Jiezi. Firstly, totemism come into being in ancient China. For the characters appears at that time, it's hard for modern people to understand the relationship between the grapheme and meaning. In the aspect of totemism, using totemic material to analyze them could help people comprehend them. Secondly, oracle and posy are the earliest fonts we could see at present. They keep the general purpose that why ancestors create a certain character. When Xushen explain the meaning of one character, what he refers to is seal character not oracle, however, it's about 1500 years since seal character developed to oracle. In that course, the form of some meaning symbols had been changed, thus, the meaning they took was misunderstood by him. Connecting oracle and posy with myths of totemism could find out the original meaning of one character, so that remedying the faults that Xushen made.