How did gossip originate?

Fan Wenlan believes that gossip is guided by numbers, pictures or words, which means that gossip may be the prototype of Chinese characters. Others believe that gossip is transformed from Babylonian cuneiform. Guo Moruo thinks that the male and female characters in gossip are symbols of male and female organs respectively. He said that from the root of gossip, we can clearly see that it is a relic of ancient genital worship. Draw a picture like a man's vagina and split it into two like a woman's vagina, thus deducing the concepts of men and women, parents, yin and yang, rigidity and softness, and heaven and earth. In fact, it was money who first put forward this statement. He said that the divination of Gankun is the symbol of bisexual genitalia.

Qu Wanli, Feng Youlan and Japanese scholar Tian Chengzhi believe that hexagrams evolved from tortoise divination. Businessmen always use tortoise shells to pray for good or bad luck. They took a tortoise shell as a tool for divination, first asked the question of divination, then drilled it with a knife and baked it on the fire. At this time, there are many cracks around the borehole, which are called "signs". According to these signs, the fortune teller judges whether the problem is auspicious or ominous. Gossip is an imitation of omen, and it and the sixty-four hexagrams are both normative "omens".

Zhang believes that divination and divination are two methods of ancient divination. Divination is the tortoise shell or cattle scapula mentioned above, which is burned first, so as to bode well and judge good or bad luck, such as Oracle Bone Inscriptions. On the other hand, this is not the case. Instead, we use tactics to count from left to right in a certain way and get several numbers to judge good or bad. This is the gossip of Zhouyi. This method is based on people's concept of parity classification of numbers. It records the emergence and application of an abstract mathematical concept in the history of ancient civilization in China.

Recently, according to ethnological research, it is proposed that the Yin and Yang of Eight Diagrams are only symbols used by ancient wizards to represent odd and even numbers, while hexagrams are a combination of three odd and even numbers. Obviously, ethnological research helps us to understand the origin of rumors, but it has not been recognized by academic circles, so it is still unconfirmed speculation like other statements.

From this point of view, the mysterious symbol of gossip is really a difficult mystery.