Also known as NUGUA, NU-KUA, NU-KWA, NU-WA
NU-GUA: One of the SAN-HUANG, she's the Serpent Creator Goddess of
Mankind, Marriage and Mud.
After PAN-GU formed the Universe, the primitive Earth was full of
endless mud, upon which roamed depressingly dumb animals. In short,
the place was extremely dull.
Stifling her yawns, NU-GUA decided to liven things up a bit by
creating an exciting new species. There was plenty of raw material
available, even if most of it consisted of brown mud, black mud and
yellow mud.
Using her own body as a guide, she fashioned new beings from the
earth. But they didn't look right with a huge snaky tail, so she
gave them legs instead.
These little people took ages to make, but looked beautiful. They
ran around worshipping her in a delightful manner and quite touched
her heart. But there weren't nearly enough of them to populate an
entire planet, so NU-GUA decided to speed up production by cutting
a few corners with the next batch.
Dipping a vine into a particularly foul patch of sloppy mud, she
swung it around her head and covered the earth in dollops of
humanity for miles around. Okay, so they were ugly, crude and
unseemly, but what they lacked in refinement they made up for in
quantity. "Don't worry," she said to the beautiful first batch,
"they can be the peasants and do all the work."
Having established the human race and also the class system, NU-GUA
then invented sex and marriage, for which everyone was very
grateful. It certainly saved her from spending the rest of her
existence playing with mud.
With her husband FU-XI as first ruler and teacher of mankind, all
was going well. Until monstrous rivals GONG-GONG and ZHU-RONG got
into a fight and caused the first Great Flood. Water poured from
the Heavens and her human creations were devastated by the
devastation.
To restore cosmic harmony, NU-GUA took some brightly colored stones
from a river bank, melted them down and used them to repair the
hole in the sky. (Although nowhere stated, we imagine this is a
reference to the first rainbow.) She then propped up the Heavens as
best she could using the legs of a turtle. (See DA-YU for a
slightly less weird version of events.)
In some accounts NU-GUA is snaky, in others she is known as Snail
Woman with woman's torso and head. And why not? Our own Holy Snail?
remains inscrutable on the subject and refuses to leave his
shell.
VITAL STATISTIX
Area or people: n/a
Location : China
Gender : Female
Category : Deity
Pronunciation : Noo Goo-ar
Alternative names : NUGUA, NU-KUA, NU-KWA, NU-WA
Attributes : Coming soon
Mystic number : 2167 (a)