What were the sacred animals in ancient China?

Six Daijoko gods: White Tiger, Xuanwu Suzaku, Qinglong, Gouchen Tengshe. These six animals play an important role in China's divination, especially in Taoist magic and Liu Yizhong.

In China, the white tiger is the god of war and war. Tigers have the functions of avoiding evil, avoiding disasters, praying for blessings, punishing evil and promoting good, and making money into treasure.

Get rich, tie the knot, etc. And it is one of the four spirits, and of course it is also changed from the stars. Among these 28 stars, there are 7 in the west: osmium, building, stomach, ang, bi, Gou and Shen. Therefore, it is the representative of the west, and its whiteness is due to the west. The five elements belong to gold and the color is white. So it is called white tiger not because it is white, but because it comes from five elements.

Xuanwu is a spiritual thing composed of turtles and snakes. The original intention of Xuanwu is Xuanming, and the ancient sound of Wu and Ming is Xuanwu.

There is a connection. Xuan means black; Ghost means yin. At first, Xuan Ming described the tortoise divination as follows: the tortoise's back is black, and the tortoise divination is to let the tortoise go to the underworld to ask his ancestors, bring back the answers and show them to the world in the form of divination. Therefore, the earliest Xuanwu is the tortoise. Since then, the meaning of Xuanming has been expanding. Turtles live in rivers, lakes and seas (including turtles), so Xuan Ming became a water god; The tortoise lives long, and Xuan Ming has become a symbol of immortality; The first underworld was in the north, and Oracle Bone Inscriptions's divination in the Shang Dynasty meant "divination must go north", so Xuan Ming became a northern god again.

Suzaku is also a mysterious bird. Suzaku is one of the four spirits, and it is the general name of the seven nights in the south. Well, ghosts, willows, stars, Zhang, wings and birds are connected into a bird shape, which is also called a mysterious bird. Zhu is red, like fire, and the south belongs to fire, hence the name Suzaku. In modern times, influenced by the myth of fairy birds in the west and Japanese pop culture, Chinese people sometimes regard fairy birds as suzaku in translation and cognition. In fact, there is no saying in ancient myths and legends of China that Suzaku will be reborn from the fire. "Phoenix Nirvana" is just a poem written by Mr. Guo Moruo with reference to the legend of fairy birds in the West. Similarly, Suzaku is not a phoenix.