The story used in Tchaikovsky's ballet, in which a prince encounters at the lake side a flock of swans who were actually girls that were under a evil witch's spell, is a fairly recent version. A much older version retained some details that relate to the Chinese story of Cow Boy and Weaving Girl as well as even more ancient Chinese tales:

A young man (prince was presumably a later detail arising in the later romantic fairytale era with knights rescuing damsels in distress and princes living happily after with princesses) saw a flock of 7 swans descending at the side of a lake, and turning into maidens who bathed in the water after shedding their feather dresses. He hid the dress of one girl, making it impossible to change back and fly away with the others birds. She went home with him as his wife.

The story has various different endings, e.g., the wife found where her feather dress was hidden and flew away; the husband broke the promise not to see her bathing, etc., which reflect different shamanistic ideas of different regions/eras, but these do not concern us here. For me the significant issue is the story's similarity to the weaving girl story:

The daughters of jade emperor descended to earth to bathe in the Yao pond, and the cow boy hid the clothes of the youngest, 7th princess, who, unable to return to heaven, went home with him. After they had two children, the jade emperor sent heavenly soldiers to bring her back. Seperated by the milky way, the lovers were able to meet once a year over a bridge made by descending magpies...

Also we have the Shang Dynasty legend that its founder Princess Jiandi was bathing with her sisters, and swallowed an egg left behind by a black bird, which made her pregnant. 

Lake/pond, birds, boy getting girl by hiding her clothes, lovers who were not allowed to maintain a permanent relationship, even the number 7, are shared features of two apparently unrelated stories. Coincidence? Not if you are familiar with the ancient (and in some isolated regions of China and other parts of the world, still ongoing) fertility rituals: once a year, girls of a tribe go to bathe in a sacred pond, and boys from neighbouring tribes come to find partners by taking the girls' clothes. It takes place once a year so that child births would be synchronized and breast feeding can be shared - with high mother and infant mortality, it is important that orphanes babies can be fed by other mothers who gave birth about the same time.

4. Templars and Uroboros

In October 1307 King Philip of France ordered the arrest of the leaders of the Knights of the Temple or Templars on charges of heresy and devil worship; after their confessing under torture, Pope Clement agreed to the dissolution of the Templars, the execution of some members, and the handing over of the Templars’ property to the Hospitaliers (or Knights of St John). Even today it is generally thought that Philip was motivated by getting his hands on the Templars’ money, but if we judge by the result, then this is quite incorrect, since no trace of the reputed fabulous wealth was found, and even today there are people who still make a lifelong pursuit out of chasing after the “buried treasure.”

My own views on the Templars are quite different: Since they were involved in banking and money transfer, they would have lent out their funds, so that their main assets were in what today’s accountants call “accounts receivable”; after their downfall, those who borrowed money from them would have conveniently forgotten to repay (and might be afraid to be known as Templar clients) so that the Templar assets simply evaporated. Further, I believe they were indeed heretic and engaged in worship practices unapproved by the Church.

Suspicions about their religious purity had existed almost immediately after their occupation of the Jerusalem temple; it was widely held that they discovered ancient documents describing the rituals of the Hebrews and were practising them. However, their military reputation and their services to important people in the Church and the European courts through their international network, including financial services, provided them with protection, especially in view of the need to maintain unity in the face of the Muslim onslaught on the Holy Land. After the failure of the Crusades and their retreat to European home countries, their position became more precarious, and some of their dealings with King Philip may have disadvantaged him with a last straw impact, but it would be incorrect to see that as the main cause – medieval people took religion much more seriously than we, so that consciously at least, he would be thinking of spiritual issues.

Very little reliable information about the Templars’ actual worship practices remain – evidence presented against them at their trial and their own confessions are both untrustworthy. What we can go by is the practice of the Freemasons, who officially acknowledge their Templar tradition: after the arrest of their leaders, some of the Templars escaped to Scotland and found refuge in the town craft leagues; gradually they rebuilt a new organization and an international network. Quite a number of US Presidents (including George Washington, together with a substantial number of fellow revolutionary leaders) were Masons, and in a number of countries in the West, Mason membership remains important for professions like police, for which group cohesion has a special value.

The Masons, too, were accused of cult worship, and again little reliable information is available as members are sworn to secrecy, but Masons are known for their compass and right angle emblem. Obviously, these are familiar tools of trade for masons and craftsmen, but two points: first, we saw earlier that the Chinese use compass to represent round heaven or yang, and right angle to represent square earth or yin – is this just a coincidence? second, the Masonic compass-right angle combination happens to form a six-pointed star similar to the Star of David – another coincidence.

To my mind, the various pieces of isolated information fit an overall pattern: Not only did the Masons/Templars adopt certain ancient Hebrew worship practices, these practices originated from the very remote past when Hebrews and Chinese shared a common origin. Given the limited evidence so far, this might seem a far-fetched proposition, but the pursuit is only starting…

Now I turn to Uroboros, the snake that swallows its own tail, symbolizing the identity of begin and end, the endless cycle of life, and again find commonality East and West.

The ancient jews believed that humans lost their paradise when they ate the fruits of the tree of knowledge; the greeks had a related concept: Hesiod said he lived in the age of iron in which men had become evil, whereas in the beginning it was the age of gold when men were gods, then silver when men were noble, then bronze when men were heroic (Homeric); but it was the chinese who took the idea further: in Daodejing, Laozi derided the Confucian (and Platonic) ideal of government by the wise with the dismissive words “With the Sage came the Big Lie”, and proposed that only by keeping people simple minded could one have a perfect society

Daodejing views the world as having come from nothing, because thing and nothing are the same; nothing is the base of everything; it is the Tao of all things, and to get on in the world, we must follow the Tao of nothing; striving is bad because it strains; trying to get more, we would end up with less; if some get more, others would end up with less; hence less is more and thing is nothing

But Laozi did not invent the idea of thing-nothing himself – he was not a nihilist hermit, but a government official interested in the technique of ruling, and indeed the Legalists, like Hanfeizi, would claim him as a pioneer of their school, because a ruler need to practise the art of nothingness, not revealing his personal thoughts about the actions of his subordinates, who are supposed to be strictly guided by the law; pulling in the opposite direction, the later Taoists turned Laozi into a unworldly hermit retreating from the public life, even an immortal with cosmic powers; exploited and distorted, Laozi and Tao were almost anything an author would like them to be.

In fact, the idea of thing-nothing was much earlier than Laozi, as revealed by archaeological discoveries dating from over 5000 years ago or twice as old as Laozi: coiled jade dragons found in Manchuria/Inner Mongolia border region and pottery paintings of human faced fishes both show a snake whose tail touches its head, similar to the Uroboros snake of West Asia – head is tail, end is beginning, nothing is thing – not only is the principle of nothing very ancient; it is also common between East and West.

Uroboros played some part in Hebrew and Babylonian religious practice, and has some connection to the Templars/Freemasons too, though reliable details are difficult to get; its main place today is in European witchcraft. Frequently, such witchcraft diagrams have either the Star of David or compass-right angle inside the Uroboros coil, thus revealing its Hebrew origin – the geometric similarity to the Masonic compass and triangle is another indicator.

5. Thunder and Fire

Earlier I pointed out the similarities between Adam-Eve and Fuxi-Nuwa, but there is a major problem: Adam-Eve are about how human race started, while Fuxi-Nuwa are about how it recovered from the flood, creation versus re-creation; the Hebrews had a separate re-creation story, but with a different, male figure Noah, in fact two such stories, since Lot’s escape from his city’s destruction after divine warning is so similar to Noah surviving the flood.

Actually, Chinese legends do include a creation myth figuring Nuwa too: she first made humans individually by kneading mud; later for higher productivity, she flung mud with a piece of ivy and the drops turned into humans; the re-creation and creation stories are carried in books side by side without anyone being bothered by the contradiction; when challenged, any author or reader would dismiss the issue as “these are just stories” or at most “maybe there were different figures given the same name”.

Greek re-creation story has Deucalion and Pyrra throwing rocks on a riverbank to quickly produce new humans; this is rather like Nuwa’s mud flinging, but again there is a contradiction: this time the Chinese story is about creation, Greek re-creation; I previously pointed out that the name Nu-wa sounds similar to E-ve on one hand and No-ah on the other, hinting that the two Hebrew stories might well have shared a common origin.

Making humans from mud is culturally related to farming with human life being dependent on soil, to burial in soil after death with life returning to soil (and hopefully regenerating from there), and to the invention of pottery making; in China there is usually the mention of “yellow” mud, linking the skin colour of the people with the colour of the soil in the area which the Yellow River passed on its way to the sea; this however may be an added detail after the people arrived in china.

There is a curious story inserted into some Han books: a pregnant woman was warned by an angel to run eastwards without looking back if she saw water in the mortar; one day this occurred and she ran, but looked back, saw her village submerged in water, and turned into a mulberry tree; her baby was found in the tree’s hollow and later became an important Shang historic figure. What does this remind us of? First there is an analogy to the escape of Lot from Sodom, his wife looking back at the burning city and turning into a salt pillar; there is an important difference from Lot however: Lot’s story is a moral tale – the good are rewarded, but they must obey divine will completely, and disobeying the command against looking back brought instant punishment; this does not come across very clearly in the Chinese story.

But things do not end there; I now present a set of stories involving different characters yet capturing the same or related ideas

Group A. Because of some good deed, a brother-sister pair was warned about impending flood and escaped in a boat; they picked up a survivor despite being told not to do this; the rescued ingrate tried to harm them in some way…

This group of stories (and there are many versions all over China, and indeed in other countries too) is the closest to Lot’s story, with divine reward for the good and punishment for disobedience; it appears that the moral tale had somehow been joined with the brother-sister re-creation story.

Group B. A brother-sister pair, but more often an old woman, was given divine warning along the line “if the eye of this statue turns red, escape”or “if blood appears on the city gate, escape”; their/the old woman’s frequent checking of the statue/gate aroused question by some official or naughty boy, who decided to play a practical joke by painting the statue/gate red, but this made the disaster occur ; in versions with the brother-sister, they survive to regenerate humans, whereas the fate of the old woman is usually neglected in stories featuring her.

This group of stories is also widespread, with a particularly well known version in Japan involving not a statue/city gate but a tower on a hill; the story’s moral is more subtle: it is dangerous to play tricks with divine will.

Group C. The father of a brother-sister couple captured the thunder god (who for some reason is a centipede on earth) with the help of his chicken, but the couple released him; the thunder god then send down a flood to destroy all but allowed the couple to escape.

Group D. A tribe that does not eat chicken visited a neighbouring tribe, and was made to eat chicken, which started a tribal war and total destruction; this might seem to have no relation with the earlier ones, but then we note that the tribe involved worshiped the thunder god, which did not like chicken! Since the cock crowed the dawn, the chicken tribe would be bird-sun worshipers, while the thunder god tribe presumably worshiped cloud-dragon-snake.

Group E. The fire god Zhurong and water god Gonggong had a great war; after his defeat, Gonggong butted the heaven pillar Buzhoushan causing the sky to collapse and the land to be flooded

So what was the story from which everything started? Was it a flood/tsunami that wiped out a whole snake-worshiping tribe leaving a brother-sister couple to regenerate humans, or was it a snake-bird tribal war that destroyed everything? We simply do not know; all we have are reconstructions of later authors who took various legendary fragments and tried to put together complete narratives, throwing in their own ideas in the process.

In the flood discussion I already broadened our sights to Greek legends; here I fix on the story of Prometheus – fire was an issue of critical importance to primitive people, and indeed some prehistorians regard its use as the divide line between man and ape. Fire tenderizes meat and improves its taste as well as digestibility; it frightens away savage beasts that might otherwise endanger humans; it burns away bushes and grass, turning them into fertilizing ashes, to facilitate spring planting; perhaps more importantly for the primitive times, it turns food and other offerings to the gods into smoke, which rises to heaven so that the gods get to enjoy the offered things and are persuaded to shower blessings on the offerers

At first only some tribes, indeed only selected members of these tribes, know the secret of how to light fires and keep them burning; others had to obtain fire from them, thus putting themselves in a subordinate position; this is the original meaning of getting fire down from heaven; a tribe that allows its secret knowledge about fire to be shared with others would weaken its position, hence the gods’ anger with Prometheus; equivalent stories exist in China and other parts of Asia

More intriguing is the Chinese story of Emperor Zbuanxu ordering his fire chief Zhongli to “separate heaven and earth”; why the fire chief for this particular job? because the separation is about heavenly fire and earthly fire: only Zhuanxu’s own tribe was permitted to keep a divine fire for worshiping and communicating with heaven; other tribes can only worship the earth, and must put out their fires on a particular day each year, the cold food day, and relight their hearths with fire received from “heaven” that evening; the practice was followed even in Han times.

Unfortunately for Zhuanxu, some tribes balked at the order, and the hapless Zhongli was ordered to attack and suppress these defiant subjects; the fight did not go well for Zhongli however, and he was executed for his poor show; these were the events behind the “collapse of heaven” when the defeated tribe chief Gonggong was supposed to have knocked down the pillar of heaven at Buzhoushan (the mountain too wide to go around). This brings us back to the previous story.

Indeed there is a simple explanation for all these overlapping and contradictory stories: before the invention of writing, history was passed down the generations orally; different legendary fragments are produced as they passed through different tribal branches and storytellers; the fragments may be repetitious, contradictory and incomplete; when the time came to write the stories down, the authors would attempt to tidy things up by collecting from different sources, consolidating obviously similar stories into one, and laying out individual episodes into what looked to them like a logical sequence, sometimes adding their own touches to make things fit; to the authors of Genesis, it was logical that there should be a creation episode before a re-creation episode; the Chinese, not trying to produce a tribal religious document, did not take things so seriously, and left the stories as they were.

I have pointed out a tantalizing set of similarities between the legends of east and west. How do they match up with history? DNA tests show that all the humans of the world are descended from a small group that left Africa around 60,000 years ago. Within 10,000 years after that, some had reached Australia, presumably via India and Indonesia, mostly migrating along the coast. However, any ancient sites they might have left behind could not be located, since the melting of the glaciers that took place from around 10,000 BC caused a rise in sea levels that would have submerged all the low lying locations they lived at en route. Most probably they were close relatives of the Sen or Bushman tribesmen that still roam parts of Africa.

We do not know whether the same small group split into three, or some other closely related group(s) left Africa later following the steps of the first. One lot, after passing through Iran and Kazakstan, found large grass eating animals like the mammoth on the great planes of eastern europe and developed the hunting skills needed to use these as food source. By following migrating herds. some of them pass through Siberia and ended up in North America, while others turned west and adapted to the cold climate of western europe. Their descendants are the modern Mongoloids and Caucasoids. Others remained in central asia and took up farming and herding. Whatever method of making a living, the people were frequently on the move: after slash-and-burn exhausted the fertility of their current land, the farmers would find a new plot near by, while the herders drove their cattle and sheep where grass and water could be found. The hunters followed the elks and mammoths.

While some of the Mongoloids ended up in China, there had also been a second, in fact larger source, coming up along the coast from the south, whose genes are more closely related to the Pacific Islanders. These coast hugging people developed quite different skills from hunting: fishing, boat building, navigation… They worshiped thunder gods and dragons. Hunters used bow and arrow, and making arrows requires feathers; the hunters thus had an affinity to birds; they saw the sun as golden bird. In contrast, the agricultural people felt greater affinity to snakes that hibernated in winter and awoke in spring, the moon whose cycles coincided with menstruation and fertility.

One such tribe, probably after living in India where they worshiped the cobra and developed their abstract thinking, went both east and west, arriving at the east coast of China about 10000 years ago and followed the two great rivers westwards into the interior parts of China, meeting the hunters/nomads coming down from the north and the west. Some of those that went west from India ended up in Babylon where they developed a different set of ideas about the world, in particular evolving from a syllabic language to a phonetic one. We know them as Sumerians. A nomadic tribe called the Habiru (East of the River) picked up some of these after living around and mixing with the Sumerian/Babylonian people, then went on westwards towards the Mediterranean.

All roads lead to Rome, but some are better maintained than others; what distinguished the Chinese and Jews were that they preserved more of their primitive legends in their written records. They were both people of the book(s), allowing us to see glimpses of their common past.i