Nüwa: The Goddess Who Mended the Heavens

The Great Catastrophe In the ancient days, the world was in harmony until two powerful deities—the Water God Gonggong and the Fire God Zhurong—fought a terrible battle. In his rage at losing, Gonggong struck his head against Mount Buzhou, the giant pillar that held up the sky. The pillar snapped, causing the heavens to tilt to the northwest and the earth to sink to the southeast. Giant cracks opened in the ground, fires raged, and floods drowned the lands. The world was falling back into Chaos.

The Sacred Repair Nüwa, the mother goddess who had created humanity out of clay, looked upon her suffering children with deep compassion. She decided she must mend the sky. She gathered thousands of multicolored stones from the riverbeds and melted them in a great fire to create a magical paste. With this shimmering substance, she patched the holes in the celestial dome. To ensure the sky would never fall again, she took the legs of a giant celestial turtle and set them as new pillars at the four corners of the earth.

The Balance Restored Nüwa’s work was exhaustive, but she did not stop until the fires were extinguished and the floods were channeled back into the rivers. Although the sky remained slightly tilted (which is why the sun, moon, and stars move toward the west and the rivers in China flow toward the east), the world was safe once more. Nüwa showed that even when the very pillars of the universe break, they can be repaired through wisdom, labor, and a heart full of love.