Zigu legend

As a big festival, people have always attached great importance to the Lantern Festival. Ming Jiajing's "Xiaoshan County Records" said: "In the Yuan Dynasty, the thoroughfare in the city was decorated with bamboo and pine. 13 test light, 18 turn off the light and take a five-day vacation. If you can't do this, you all think that this is not a sign of abundance. " The county annals compiled in the Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, similar to the customs of the Lantern Festival, are inseparable from the word "lamp". In fact, from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, the sand gradually turned into land, and the Lantern Festival was not decorated. However, the custom of burning locusts in Yingzi Valley on the Lantern Festival sandy land was completely ignored by the county records.

The so-called Zigu is Ce Shen in the ancient legend of China. Judging from the ancient books such as Chronicle of Jingchu and Record of Ting Anne, the custom of inviting a daughter-in-law for the Lantern Festival is very popular in many places. There are three main theories about the origin of Zi Gu Shen. The earliest record, see the Southern Dynasties Liu's "Different Gardens" Volume V, said that Zigu God had already existed. She used to be a maid and concubine of a family. Because she was jealous of the housewife, she always made her do dirty work and tortured her. My daughter-in-law was badly abused and died angrily on the fifteenth day of the first month. The second statement comes from the biography of Zigu Goddess by Su Shi, a great writer in the Song Dynasty, which is the full text of this wonderful book:

On the first day of the first month of Yuanfeng's third year, Yu Shi went to Beijing and came to Huangzhou. From February to the county. The following year, Pan Bing, a scholar, said, "What a surprise! The official was ordered at the beginning, and the yellow man was unknown. Guo, a descendant of Zhou God, was eloquent and good at writing poems. He said, "Su Gong is coming, but I can't meet him." It's time, the male will be the sky, and the god will be the sky. In the first month of next year, C said, "God has returned to the Guo family." If you expect, you will be covered with grass and trees, you will be put in the hands of a woman, and the second boy will help you. Draw a word with a bamboo stick and say, "I am Shouyang's concubine." My surname is He, my name is Mei and my name is Li Qing. I have known that reading belongs to literature since I was a child, and I am a lonely woman. In the Tang Dynasty, Shouyang stabbed his concubine to death and brought a concubine as a servant, but his wife was jealous and was killed in the toilet. Although I dare not sue when I die, the angel saw it, complained about it and made it work for the world. There are many kinds of so-called goddesses in the world, but none is so outstanding as concubines. The public stays less for poetry, and dancing entertains the public. " Dozens of poems, agile, all have wonderful ideas, mixed with ridicule. When asked about the changes of gods, ghosts and buddhas, the answers are unexpected. Sitting on the palm of a guest's hand, he wrote "Liangzhou Carved with Knives", where the gods danced in the middle of the festival. At the end of the Song Dynasty, he bowed down and said, "Official writing is famous all over the world. Why not cherish the square paper and not let the world know that there are concubines?" Judging from the origin of He family, it is deeply resentful to be robbed by cruel officials and killed by fierce wives. Instead of mentioning the name of the secretariat, it is polite. It can be said that a guest knows his life in turn, but never talks about his privacy and guilt. Anyone who knows good words and is ashamed of not being known to the world can be a saint. Roughly record and answer its meaning.

Although the above two statements are different, they are obviously the same story, and the main points are exactly the same, that is, the son-in-law or the son-in-law is a weak woman and eventually dies of persecution. The third story comes from the story of Xiao Yun, Xiao Qiong and Zi Xiao putting the Yellow River array in the Romance of the Gods, which is quite different from the first two. Zhao Gongming, the elder brother of the three nuns, was later named the God of Wealth. At the request of Master Wen, he helped Yin to fight against Zhou Guo, who split the west, and was killed by a Taoist curse. When the three fairies avenged their brothers, they laid a Yellow River array, and used the magic weapon of mixed golden garden fights to turn most of the twelve disciples of the Buddha in the Yuan Dynasty into a Yellow River array. Later, the Buddha Lao Tzu used his divine power to break the Yellow River array, and three nuns were killed. Jiang Ziya was deified, and the three fairies became three girls in the pit. It turns out that their mixing bucket is the bucket of their children and grandchildren, that is, the toilet, so it is called Ce Shen. The Romance of the Gods was written in the Ming Dynasty, and this statement is the latest.

Midnight snack is to welcome Zigu to help her. This custom began in the Tang Dynasty. Li Shangyin's poem "Yesterday" said: "Yesterday's child was solid in heaven, and today's jade bird did work"; In his poem "I can't wait to see the lights in one night in beijing on the fifteenth day of the first month", there is a sentence "I'm too busy to see the resurgence, and I'm too ashamed to chase the villagers for the valley". In the Song Dynasty, it became more popular. From Su Dongpo's "Zi Gu Ji Shen", "The clothes and grass are placed in the hands of women, and the two boys help them." Draw characters with chopsticks ... ",which shows the clues of Hua Fu's activities. By the Ming and Qing Dynasties, this custom had been relatively fixed. The method of supporting women in different places is generally carried out in toilets or pigsty. Some of them are wrapped in old clothes on brooms or tied up with corn stalks and straw, pasted with colorful colored paper, and painted with gourds and spoons as the head of the daughter-in-law. When greeting your sister-in-law, you should say a spell: "Zi Xu (her husband) is not here, and Mrs. Cao (the first wife) has already done it, so my sister-in-law can have a good time." "If the broom becomes heavier, it means that Zi Gu has come. You can ask Zi Gu Bu questions that can be answered by numbers. It is said that the broom will nod and answer. In some places, the goddess of daughter-in-law does not tie a broom, but "it is God who feels heavy about pigs and can take care of everything." "

Sha people originally migrated from Shaoxing, and most of their customs and habits were inherited from Shaoxing. However, there is no record of receiving Zi Gu Hua Fu in the Records of Huiji in Jiatai in the Southern Song Dynasty, the Records of Huiji in Baoqing, the newly revised Records of Shaoxing City and the county records of Xiaoshan in previous dynasties, which shows that the custom of crossing the border is not very popular. So, why does sand prevail?

It turns out that the 15th day of the first month has been an important folk festival in China since ancient times. Long before the Lantern Festival custom appeared, Wu Yun, a writer in the Southern Dynasties, recorded that this day was the day when farmers sacrificed to the silkworm god. Later, with the widespread spread of Zi Gu God, people associated the activities of offering sacrifices to silkworm God and worshipping Zi Gu. By inviting Zigu, I divined silkworms in the new year. "Chronicle of Jingchu's Age" is recorded as follows: "On the fifteenth day of the first month, Zigu was welcomed at night to predict sericulture in the future." This custom is most prevalent in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces where sericulture is developed. From the reclamation of sandy land in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties to the 1950s and 1960s, sericulture was one of the two major industries alongside cotton, so it was reasonable to popularize the custom of taking over sericulture from Zigu.

A hundred miles is different from the wind. In the sand, people think that Zigu God is a little girl who is only a few years old. Her function is to manage the ash warehouse under the stove, and she is called "Grey Purple Girl". The time to receive the invitation is not the fifteenth, but the evening of the fourteenth. It must be an unmarried girl who invites the gray-purple girl, and men must avoid it. It is said that only such a gray-purple girl will "come out". Anyone who receives the invitation should not only make a "thank-the-stove chicken" with flour or rice flour when delivering the stove on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, but also keep the ash box under the stove clean before receiving Zigu from the first day of the first month to the 14th night. Therefore, all the ash bins were cleaned before making rice cakes in a year, and no ash was poured in when the fire went out.

The whole process of receiving the invitation and supporting the children is carried out quietly. It is said that Miss Grey Purple is very shy. The eldest girl first burned incense and candles in front of the stove, then put three sticks of incense in a bucket plate sprinkled with some even rice, lit it, put the bucket plate in her hand on the ash bed, and read a spell. Magic is different from other places, very poetic, its word cloud:

Qingming in the first month, Qingming in February.

Peach blossoms in March;

Hundred flowers are green and colorful,

I picked up the grey purple girl to see the dragon lantern;

Get on the sedan chair and watch the dragon lantern.

Put down the sedan chair and watch the lanterns;

Let me know when the grey purple girl gets on the sedan chair.

The eldest daughter recited the spell seven times in a row, and then took out the bucket and plate. Another person standing next to her (who must also be a woman, but the age requirement is not strict) came out with a bamboo basket in his hand. Before arriving at the hall, put the bucket plate on the table, insert a chopstick on the edge of the bamboo Tao Tao to make it droop, and then each person grabs the edge of Tao Tao with one finger and hangs it on the bucket plate. Then, I asked the girl's age: "Hey, girl, how old is she this year?" If Tao Tao shakes it three times, the chopsticks will click on the rice three times, which means he is three years old. If it's five, it's five. It is said that at least three o'clock and at most seven o'clock, that is to say, all gray-purple girls are between three and seven years old. The grey purple girl "answered" her age, indicating that she was picked up and asked if she could continue, but not vice versa. The content of the question is mainly about silkworms. It is said that silkworms are the most sensitive, but many people ask others. For example, people who grow cotton and wheat are not asking about sericulture, but about the harvest of cotton and wheat. No matter what kind of question you ask, be sure to let the girl with purple and gray answer with numbers. For example, ask "Miss Grey Purple, how good is the harvest of a silkworm flower this year?" Six points is 60% and four points is 40%. Such as asking: "Miss Grey Purple, what happened to Grandpa this year?" It'll be fine. Count it even. "The answer is clear. It's said that it's a sin to pick up the grey purple girl to show her spirit, so it's not long to help her. Don't ask unimportant things. After that, I finally asked Miss Grey Purple what she wanted. If chopsticks draw an ingot on rice, burn a string of paper ingots for her to express her gratitude. Of course, if the pattern drawn is not an ingot, I think those women will think it is an ingot. This is a wishful thank you, the paper ingot is already here.

On the fourteenth night of the first month, when the girls quietly invited the goddess Zigu, the boys were busy burning locusts in the wild. This activity, initiated and organized by no one, is a spontaneous behavior of boys. In order to catch up with the time of burning locusts, the boys always forget to eat a bowl of special dinner for the Lantern Festival-fried rice cake with rapeseed, so they went to the wild early. When it gets dark, they will burn the reeds by the pond and the thatch on the ridge, or tie torches with hemp stalks, wheat straws and bamboo shoots wrapped by themselves. And burning while running in the field, shouting: "Wow! Wow! Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho! Then, on the vast sandy plain, small torches and fires were lit. Then more and more fires and more crying. Suddenly asked, there are flowing flames everywhere. It is said that the purpose of setting fire to grass in such a cheerful way is to burn eggs and accumulate dust, so as to make the fields fertile, so as to herald a bumper year.

The custom of burning locusts was inherited from Haining (Zheshan and Nanyang, which was transferred from Haining to Xiaoshan in Jiaqing period of Qing Dynasty), and its popularity was related to frequent locust plagues in sandy land history. In Xiaoshan 1929, the recorded catastrophic locust plague occurred in sandy land. Locust is like a big grasshopper, with developed hind legs and good at jumping and flying. It feeds on Gramineae plants, and the hard mouthparts can only eat the whole cotton and corn with a bare pole. It also has the habit of living in groups and is extremely fertile. In the dry season, it spreads very fast, often flying in the dark, and everywhere it goes, large crops are destroyed. In the past, there was no pesticide to control insects, and all of them were captured manually. Locusts lay eggs in short, curved ovipositor tubes and lay eggs piece by piece at the roots of crops. The main way to remove ovaries is to burn them. Lantern Festival and Spring Festival activities have ended, and spring ploughing production is about to begin. Burning locusts is listed as one of the contents of the Lantern Festival, which means not forgetting the plague of locusts and taking agriculture as the foundation.

Xiaoshan's old county annals all say: "The people in the east are more simple and honest, while the people in the west are more humble and honest." As a sandy land in the east of Xiaoshan, burning locusts is despised by local chroniclers because of its meanness. In fact, it fully reveals the "simplicity" closely related to people's livelihood; In contrast, the lanterns in Xitu are really a little lost.