The gods who deal with lightning, like Zeus in Greek mythology and Thor in Nordic mythology, are depicted very powerful and dignified in most myths
But strangely enough, in Chinese myths and legends, the god of lightning is portrayed as ridiculous and foolish Taepyeonggwanggi, a book compiled during the Northern Song period in China, contains many stories of thunderstorms being defeated or captured by humans and humiliated
The first story is part of a book called Biography in the Pacific
Around 806-821 CE in the late Tang Dynasty, there was a custom in Haegang County, the Neuju Peninsula in southern Guangdong Province, China, where residents built a shrine to serve the Neuju and held a memorial service to rain whenever a drought occurred Also, the residents of Haegang Prefecture never ate yellow corvina with pork because if they did, lightning struck and killed a person who violated the taboo
However, from one day, there was a severe drought that dried up the water in the pond, so the residents went to the shrine and offered a memorial service to the thunderbolt, saying, “Please bring down the rain,” but it did not rain at all
Then, a man named Jin Ran-bong got angry and shouted, “It’s no use for a shrine like this who only eats ancestral rites and doesn’t help at all!” and went to the shrine with a torch, set it on fire, and ate corvina and pork together in the field, breaking the taboo head-on
Perhaps angry at Jinranbong’s provocation, the sky suddenly became cloudy, thunder rang, and rain fell, and lightning struck Jinranbong Peak
But Jin Lan-bong swung the knife he had taken in advance into the air, and the thunderbolt cut his left thigh with Jin Lan-bong’s knife and fell to the ground His face was like a bear or a pig, his head was horned, his whole body was covered with fur, and his blue wings were on his back
When the thunderbolt fell to the ground, the clouds lifted and the rain stopped, and Jin Ran-bong tried to cut the thunderbolt’s neck with a knife while he was at it, but the residents stopped him and said, “The thunderbolt is the god of heaven, so I’m afraid I’ll get punished!”
Meanwhile, clouds flew from the sky, wrapped up the thunderbolt, and took it back to the sky, and after a while, a huge amount of rain fell, resolving the drought in Haeju-hyeon
The second story is written in the Receiver, a book written by Ganbo~336, a scholar of the period of China’s Dongjin 317-420
There lived a farmer named Janggu in the Ohheung area, and every time he went out to plow the fields outside his house, the rice he packed disappeared every day So one day, a janggu hid secretly and watched from afar in a pocket with rice, and a big snake stole it and ate it
Only then did Janggu realize the reason why the rice was gone, so he ran with the spear he had brought in advance and stabbed the snake, which ran away into the hole he dug in the ground and said, “How dare you hurt me! I’m close to the thunderbolt, so I’ll ask him to lighten it on you!” he threatened
And after a while, as the snake said, it rained, and thunder and lightning hung over the head of the janggu, as if it were really about to strike Then Janggu got angry and shouted at the lightning
“That snake stole my food and ate it, and I stabbed it to punish it, but why should I be struck by lightning? It’s so foolish that you don’t even know that! If the thunderbolt strikes me, I’ll stab the thunderbolt in the stomach with a spear!”
Then, when the thunderbolt heard that, it struck the snake hidden in the hole, not the janggu, and the snake died
The source of the third story is also a receiver, and a man named Yang Do-hwa was working while plowing the field during the Seojin era, and when it suddenly rained from the sky and thunder struck, he moved under the mulberry tree, saying, “There will be lightning soon, so I should avoid it.”
However, the lightning followed to the bottom of the mulberry tree and hit Yang Do-hwa, who picked up the hoe he had and fought with the lightning and broke it
Then the lightning struck the ground and soon revealed its identity It looked like a monkey with a head like a monkey and a body like a furry beast, with horns 3 feet and 90 centimeters long, red lips and protruding eyes The thunderbolt was hit by a homie wielded by Yang Do-hwa and had one of his arms broken
The reason why the new thunderbolt, one of the terrible natural disasters, often appears as a role of being defeated or humiliated by people in Chinese folk tales is probably because of the ridiculous portrayal of thunderbolt in novels and plays that spread to the public