What does a turtle-backed snake mean?

Xuanwu is a spiritual thing composed of turtles and snakes. Xuanwu originally meant Xuanming, and the ancient sounds of Wu and Ming are interlinked. Xuan means black; Ghost means yin. At first, Xuan Ming described the tortoise's divination as follows: the tortoise's back is black, and the tortoise's divination is to invite the tortoise to the underworld to ask questions, 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; It turned out that the underworld was in the north, and the divination of Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Shang Dynasty was' its divination will be in the north', so Xuan Ming became a northern god again.

Follow-up: Please tell me what snake means.

A: In ancient China, great divine power was always compared with the phenomenon of the sympathetic evolution of everything, and the divine power of reproduction was worshipped. The snake itself is a symbol of reproduction. Xuanwu appeared in the shape of tortoise and snake, which was regarded by the ancients as a symbol of male and female mating and reproduction. Wei Boyang in the Eastern Han Dynasty (who lived around 12 1 year) also used the example of tortoise and snake to explain that Yin and Yang must cooperate: "Guan Guan Sui dove, in Jiangzhou, is a gentle and graceful lady, the husband is not lonely, and the mother is not lonely. Xuanwu tortoise and snake help each other.