Erhlitou Culture is also related to them. The map shows the general location of these clans all along the river, although they probably extended east in all the tributaries and wetland areas. The Huanghe (Yellow River) is in yellow. The river god Ho played an important part in ancient Chinese ritual, requiring his own set of animal and human sacrifices which were sunk, or buried on the river banks. There is speculation by Chinese hydraulic engineers that the sharp northward turn of the river (as it flows to the sea) was due to an earthquake and thereafter the river's new course destroyed a significant portion of the Shang lands and caused the dynasty to collapse.

The first evidence of divination was on a turtle plastron excavated at Wuyang which were apparently carbon dated to 8500-7500 BC. Archaic symbols were written on the plastron but they have not been deciphered. However, it is instructive to note that the most ancient form of reading turtle shells was without cracking them - reading the shell in its natural state. According to Eva Wong, author of Seven Taoist Masters, there was a myth of the Shang Dynasty that there was a village with wise women known as the "Fu. " They were comfortable living in the midst of nature and their lives were peaceful and harmonious and they were highly spiritually evolved. The"Fu" could read the future on the shells of turtles. Further, they were said to have power over the forces of nature: To them the plants gave up their secrets of healing, wild animals obeyed them and they were capable of divination and the arts of longevity.

In discussing the theme of living closely with the land as a hunter-gatherer, the writer and field naturalist, Barry Lopez writes of the spiritual aspiration of the hunter-gather society: "Their aspiration has been "to achieve a congruent relationship with the land, to fit well in it and to achieve occasionally a state of high harmony or reverberation. The dream of the transcendent congruency including the evolution of a hunting and gathering relationship with the earth, in which a mutual relationship was understood to prevail." This mutual relationship with the land and waters was the basis of their spiritual landscape. It gave them their myths and their place in the cosmos. The Clan of the many Fu achieved that congruent relationship by understanding the turtle. They saw the cosmos reflected in its shell. If we can know the turtle in its ordinary, symbolic and mythical aspects, we can begin to understand their world.

The Shang called these wise women of nature who knew so much about turtles and divination " the many fu. " To the Fu the turtle was a model of the cosmos. The original hexagrams of the I Ching traditionally came from the markings on a turtle's back. Each plate of the shell represented one moon: Hence the saying "Thirteen moons on a turtle's back. According to the I Ching, the Fu made baskets and nets, knew the intricate knots of the fishermen and from the idea of baskets, knots, nets and turtles perceived a spiritual universe.

Lao Tze was said to have been born to a woman of the Fu who was especially beautiful and intelligent. Lao-tze is also known as Lao Erh and Lao-tzu. After eating a special fruit the girl became pregnant. An oracle said that a great spiritual adept was to be born in the region. An alternate and very plausible theory is that since Lao Erh was born at least a thousand years after the ancient times, it may that his mother was a descendant the clan of hereditary court diviners that were Royal Family Diviners in the Shang Dynasty. These royal women were called the Fu and were descended from these wise women of the villages. The Royal Family Diviner's title was Fu Hao or Fu Tzu. This bit of information may tell us that this clan of diviners survived well into the late Zhou dynasty when Lao Tzu was born. Older clans of nobility, shih were brought into the new government as an early form of bureaucracy. Certainly diviners, historians, and scribes would have been welcome at court and would have continued their duties. Finally, we can say the clan continued because their Yi, known as the Lianshuan and the Guicang survived and by the time of the birth of Lao Tzu, c. 500 BC, the origins of these documents were the subject of myths relating to the "many fu," Fu Hsi, and Pao Hsi.

According to legend, the Fu were spiritual folk who avoided contact with the less spiritual outside world. The village of Li would be a reference to Hexagram 30, "Li," means "light" as in light outlining objects or fire clinging to objects that are burning. Li also signifies a diviner of the I Ching (The mystic light that clings to the objects of the invisible world) In ancient times (and many eons before the birth of Lao Tze, small communities such as the Fu, lived and fished along the Yellow River and it's tributaries, and vast estuary. One meaning of "Erh" was "plum" which was his clan name, Lao Erh. "Tzu" indicates a member of the ruling family from the Shang Dynasty about 800 years earlier. He was also known as Lao Tan in very ancient times and is coupled with the ancient wise person known as Quan Yin. This reference is to a female who later becomes a Buddhist and Taoist saint. This must be a reference to an ancient wise woman. Many competing explanations abound about his name: Other myths claim that "Li" means plum and Lao Tzu's mother gave birth to him while leaning against a plum tree. Since the I Ching says in Hexagram 30, aptly entitled "Li, says that "the eye is holy to Li," this clan sign may have belonged to the them.

Joseph Needham, in his monumental work on Chinese culture, wrote that at the time of the Shang Dynasty conquest of the western tribes there were over 25 versions of the I Ching . The Shang king attempted to outlaw its use but later embraced the idea and brought the diviners of the clan into imperial service. Based on this we can postulate that these women gained influence and wealth and became a clan of hereditary court attendants ("the many shih"). The name of the clan and its official position in the court were transmitted from generation to generation. Female-headed clans, the shih fu were in charge of sacrifices, the reception of guests, and funerary services, and basically the managed the internal affairs of the court. The Female clan, the shih fu of the Ministry of Spring was one of the highest offices according to Commentary of Chou Ch'i (see Chang Cheng Lang, ibid. p. 110.). (left, ancient Chinese vase, origin unknown)

There is convincing evidence that this imperial office of the Fu Hao was not confined to just one king but many kings throughout the generations. Fu Hao is not a personal name but a hereditary title. These royal matrilineal diviner clans eventually perished as Royal Family diviners in the late Shang era. But it is important to remember that the clan itself and their divination skills, although no longer part of the king's retinue, continued their ancestral ways not only in the small villages along the rivers and in their estates but also in the court of the new dynasty. We also know that even when displaced by later dynasties the former royal clans were present and made sacrifices to their ancestors in the new dynasty. This is probably why the I Ching was passed on to later diviners. The written accounts of the Fu Hao divination experiences found its way into the Guicang, and the Zhouyi, two early I Ching texts.

The Fu could read the future, or "the auguries" in nature. The auguries are the subtle signs of nature that are intimately known to every person who grows up in a social group that forages along streams, shallow grass flats, bays and rivers. The natural auguries are, for instance, the forecasters of weather: Fish that begin to show roe in August are accurate predictors that the winter will be colder than normal. Drought means the crabs will not move up into the rivers to feed and thus will be smaller that year. The soft, red shell on the river shrimp accurately presages that the shrimp will soon gather and drift out to sea hidden in the floating grasses for protection.

These same foragers of the wetlands read the turtle shell at first just to understand the turtle, and probably when and where to catch the it, and where it lived, and how it mated, and which animals like to eat the turtle and in turn what the turtle liked to eat. On the coast, the influx of jelly fish means that before long the loggerhead and the hawksbill will soon appear often with their eyes swollen shut from feasting on the jellyfish. In Spring it will be time for the sea turtles to start coming ashore to lay their eggs throughout the summer months. Ancient peoples were known for placing magnetic boulders on the shore line to imprint the newly hatched turtles to return to the same area.

There is a group of carved boulders on a remote shoreline of Nicaragua, one of which is called "turtle mother." Discovered by Florida naturalist Jack Rudloe in the late 1970's, every boulder is a carving of a male or female human figure. They look somewhat like the boulders of Easter Island as they stand like sentinels looking out to sea. Inside each boulder is a field of "reversed polarity," which is magnetic imprint in the carving that is memory of a time when the earth reversed its polarity. Reversing the earth's polarity has apparently happened a few times in ancient memory and is attributed to actual collisions or close calls with large comets or other planetary bodies. This grouping of boulders that include Turtle Mother, sit high on the cliff overlooking the sea. The area in each boulder where the polarity reverses is in the left ear of the males and in the wombs of the women. The Miskito Indians, who populate the area, say that the biggest boulder is Turtle Mother. She will send the hatchlings out to sea and then she will bring them in again by magically reversing the polarity of her womb.

Jack Rudloe believes that once the worship of Turtle Mother was a full blown religion of the Caribbean peoples, lunar, magical and life-affirming and revealing our human lives intertwined with that of the turtle in the natural order of things. Today, Turtle Mother is a myth of Caribbean told by the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua. They remember when the turtle was so plentiful that whole villages made their living from turtling; so plentiful that the loggerhead, the kemp's ridley, the leatherback, and the hawksbill were common and familiar sights and the rhythms of the turtle's lives were intertwined with the people who lived near the water.

Time of the Turtle is the story of this great discovery. Another story of the hunter-gather way of life of the turtle man of the Caribbean is charmingly told by Zen Buddhist, Peter Matthiessen in The Far Tortugas.

Myths such as Turtle Mother tell the habits of the turtle and connect it in a powerful way to the forces of the cosmos. In Florida and Mexico, which have similar climate and habitat of the South China Sea, graceful green turtles can still be found grazing in the waving tropical undersea gardens of sea grass. The turtles used to be common in Florida, especially in the Spring. I am sorry to say that as children we ate these turtles occasionally before they were protected. One day while on a net boat off Ft. Pierce inlet on Florida's east coast , I gave a half-drowned green (left) artificial respiration. It had gotten caught in a trammel net and was unconscious when it was pulled in the boat. I placed my foot on the edge of the shell down by

the tail and pumped. Sea water came gushing out of his mouth with each push of my foot. Suddenly the turtle finally came around, lifted its head and took a loud gulp of precious air. The sound of that intake of air elated me for I knew the turtle would live.

Netting with the modern nets, high speed boats and satellite-guided instrumentation has spelled death to the harmonious hunter-gatherer way of life. Netting by these large oceangoing vessels is merely a manifestation of man's greed and indifference to the tremendous loss of life on these boats and the havoc it creates with the environment. They have truly turned our oceans into the killing fields while disrupting the noninvasive traditional fishing methods.

In the warm Gulf of Mexico there four sea turtles: The kemp's ridley (left), the leatherback, the loggerhead, and the green. Kemp's ridleys stay in shallow grass flats chasing blue crabs. They are the smallest of the world's sea turtles and the most cantankerous. True children of the Gulf of Mexico, they hatch on the shores of Rancheo Nuevo, south of Tamulipas, Mexico. It is not unusual to see them breeding during the daylight hours especially when the seas are rough and surf pounds the beach. The females come ashore at night, lay a hundred eggs or so and return to the sea.

Heavy yellow loggerheads, below, that weigh 300 to 400 pounds crush snails and horseshoe crabs along the continental shelves. Hawksbills patrol the sunlit tropical shallows around coral reefs and are one of the few species to adapt to eating sponges. Loggerheads still lay eggs along the beaches of Tampa Bay. Recently the more tropical Hawksbill has made an appearance in Tampa Bay, another testament to global warming. Hawksbills were sacred to the clan of Pao Hsi, the earliest and most ancient I Ching cult in memory. The hatchlings in Tampa Bay will leave the nest and head for the Gulf of Mexico on the setting of the full moon beginning in March. (The setting moon points to the open Gulf on Florida's west coast.) On each full moon thereafter the street lights at the Gulf beaches are turned off so as not to confuse the hatchlings who often mistake the streetlights for the full moon. To me, occasionally coming across these small creatures reminds me of the magic turtle that appeared to Fu Hsi in the same way. These same turtles also live in the South China Sea and were familiar to the hunter-gatherers who lived there.

Along the waterways of the world children are taught the skills of the hunter-gather: Patience, cooperative effort, alertness, and the way of moving across the land and water are the skills that count in hunter-gatherer societies. The tempos and rhythms of their lives mirror the rich and diverse animal and plant life. In such societies it is customary to watch animals for hours at a time. It is part natural curiosity, part predatory information-gathering. No shame is attached to simply watching and enjoying nature for long hours at a time as it is in modern, faster societies that value always "doing something." A modern culture that values competition, punctuality and rote learning doesn't have time for these pursuits. Not so with the ancient way of life: In the quiet hours the native peoples enjoy each other's company and repair their nets and baskets and tell stories. They watch as they hunt, trap and gather, watch for amusement, and watch in order to know. The people first began reading the natural auguries of the animal and plant life around them.

It would be natural that they would be curious about turtles: To know the uses for the turtle meat and the uses for the shell. They would have began to read the future in the turtle shell just like they would read all the other subtle signs by which nature teaches. This knowledge would then be passed on, not only by direct teaching and on-the-job training, but also by the stories of the clan that concerned the turtle. These stories may have been the typical hunter-gatherer stories that excite the imagination: Perhaps they found a spot where the little fresh water turtles gathered to mate or hatch their young. Maybe the turtle appeared in dreams to warn of danger or foretell where the fishing would be best. Perhaps a turtle turned into a human (The loggerhead when captured screams like a man.) and performed powerful deeds. In the Americas the diamondback terrapin are said to cause the rains to come and the wind to blow. Perhaps a deity appeared riding on its back. (Left, above, Neolithic turtle)

The Diamondback Terrapin carries a powerful curse only by the fishermen in the small town of Panacea, Florida. Old timers call the Diamondback Terrapin the "wind-turtle." All sorts of things happen to the fishermen who has caught one: His outboard breaks down, a hurricane comes, or someone dies of food poisoning. The Indians before these fishermen must have passed the myth along as they learned the turtle was taboo from earlier tribes: Three Indian habitations and their midden have been studied going back to c. 1240 BC. No shell of this turtle has ever been found in any Indian site along the area 40 mile stretch of coastline that has this myth. Jack Rudloe, knowing this, placed one of the turtles in his boat and a storm came up very suddenly and sank his boat. He persisted and took the turtle back to his laboratory. The next day, every animal in the fish tanks died. When they inspected the damage, it was the shell of that same turtle that had covered up the water inlet leaving all the marine species in the tanks without oxygen.

Over time, stories such as the wind-turtle, shared among a clan and passed down generation to generation in the ancient oral tradition would eventually evolve from a story into a myth. Surely this bad wind-turtle of north Florida had some powerful magic associated with it. Today the myth has come alive again for at least the Rudloe tribe and their friends who live and fish around Panacea, Florida, along 40 miles of coast line along the northern Gulf coast.

In ancient China, one clan began to call themselves "the turtle clan." It would be a clan sign and a symbol of their shared mythology. For them the turtle held up the sky. They believed that a primordial turtle inhaled and exhaled the true essence of life and they lived on its back. We know in Taoist cosmology the turtle holds up the earth and it is one of the oldest myths in the ancient world. Still even today the Taoist priest dances over the back of an imaginary turtle shell across the vault of the sky in order to commune with the cosmos and the turtle still holds up the world.

According to ancient myth: Fu Hsi's wife, Nu Gua found that the four poles holding up the earth were decayed. The sky did not cover everywhere and fires raged without ceasing. In order to patch up they sky, Nu Gua smelted stones of five colors and then cut off the legs of a sea turtle, a hawksbill, to be the four poles holding up the sky. This story was written down in the Huainanzi, a document written in the early part of the second century BC.

Buried withing the turtle myth is another myth: Myths of Fu Hsi say that the nagas who live in the sacred mountains of the Kunlun Shan says that the early I Ching clans were taught the secrets of the Universe by the nagas. Later the nagas revealed their teachings to the Buddhist monk, Nagarjuna 700 years after the death of Buddha Shakymuni), c. 50 BC. Mayahana Buddhism, the short path to liberation or enlightenment, is based on the revelations of the nagas.

More importantly, distaff diviner clans, of Li (Hexagram 30) shared imperial duties with another shih or clan known as "Ting," (Hexagram 50) during the Han Dynasty. Together these two diviner clans were known as "The Keepers of Heaven and Earth." These two female diviner clans were very powerful at court during the Shang Dynasty. Later the Fu or Li Shih and the Ting Shih, the distaff diviner clans, continued in existence at least until c. 200 BC although no longer of imperial rank.

Book III, The Commentaries of the Wilhelm-Baynes I Ching says that the earliest clan of diviners even before Fu Hsi was the clan of the Pao Hsi. Later books on the Yi have ignored the clan completely saying it is the same clan as that of Fu Hsi. Although there is room for conjecture, I believe that the clan of Fu Hsi was the second cult and third was the Clan of the Divine Husbandman that was connected with the development of agriculture. The Clan of Pao Hsi were aquatic hunter-gatherers. It is said they were a clan who made their living from the water and to whom the turtle, mussel, snail, and crab were sacred. Who were they? There is an intriguing Neolithic site of a fishing people known as the Pan-po who were located on two tributaries of the Yellow River, the Wei and Ching Rivers. They have been categorized by their pottery which is similar to the Yang-shao pottery (c. 5000 BC) and both cultures are in the same general location . What is interesting about this site is that the people had some advanced fishing

techniques for net fishing, notably the lead line: A straight, or rectangular net will have a float line at the top and a lead line at the bottom to hold the net down. Net

sinkers of this type were found there. The importance of fishing is confirmed by designs of stylized fish painted on a few of the bowls and by fishing hooks. The Pan-po culture was characterized by cord-marked red or red-brown ware, especially round and flat-bottomed bowls and pointed-bottomed amphorae. The Pan-p'o inhabitants lived in stilt houses and were supported by fishing, crabbing, trapping, hunting, and gathering. They also used three-footed vessels, the ting of hexagram 50, left, which are so prevalent in Shang times. The Wei and Ching rivers are west of Anyang but in the vicinity of the area shown in the map above as the Xia Dynasty. The confluence of these two rivers is said to have been the first image of the interaction of yin and yang. One river is very muddy; the other, very clear. The Yang-shao seemed to be a farming people who lived nearby in partially subterranean houses. The is probably the reason for the confusion between the two cultures of fishermen and farmers.

One group of diviners are said to have read the patterns on the shells of these animals without cracking them with fire (oblative divination). Perhaps the fishing people read the signs of the seasons on the turtle's shell and noticed that there is one plate on the shell for each month. Later there was the practice of fire-cracking the plastrons. Archeologists consider the oblative method as the most ancient form of divination. Since the practice was widespread in Neolithic times, we can assume that oblative divination must itself have been practiced in earliest times, perhaps even by other species of human beings. (Above, the intricate patterns on the shell of the Hawksbill turtle)

Divination for hunter-gathers begins naturally. They would naturally look to animals for portents of the winter to come, for example. Early signs of roe in fish has always meant that winter would come early. The new moon means good fishing; the full moon is poor fishing. Why? On the full moon fish move out of their school to rove across the flats and feed at night because they can see their prey in the moonlight. But the fish can also see the net and avoid capture. Netting them on the full moon is impossible. Every child of a clan of hunter-gatherers is taught the subtle signs such as these as a natural part of their world. In aquatic hunter-gathering these signs have to do with water salinity, temperature, and turbidity as well as the moon phases and the behavior of the various life forms in the food chain, of which they are a part, that responds to these varying conditions.

Plastromancy which uses the under-shell of a tortoise in fire divination has been linked to the Hsiao-thun Neolithic culture . Sculpimancy, which uses the leg bone in fire divination, has been associated with the Lung-shan who had the first known clans of specialized diviners. In sculpimancy a flat slice was split from the bone, polished, and incised with a number of oval cavities. After recording the question, the official diviner pressed a red-hot bronze point against the edge of one of the cavities, producing two cracks meeting like "T." From the orientation of these cracks, the answer was divined Both methods were used by clans living in the Yellow River estuaries. Sculpimancy was more common throughout the ancient world and has been found in such diverse areas as northern Europe, Central America, and Siberia. Above, one side of the plastron is yin and the other, yang. The T's at the bottom (2 on each side) are the places where the heat was applied. The writing at the top was done after the divination was made and later checked for accuracy. The accuracy of the divination was very important to the diviner and was a teaching tool for later students. In this way, writing is said to have begun!

There is evidence that there were clans of specialized female diviners in China who used turtle shells. These clans must have been the ones to later rise to prominence during the Shang era (c.1600 BC - 1100 BC). The institution of the Fu Tzu or Royal Family Diviner was connected to a female clan of diviners. Insofar as known, the Royal Family Diviners used turtle plastrons exclusively. In the later Chou and Qin dynasties it appears there were female diviner clans, training diviners, teaching divination, and writing early I Ching texts and recording divinations. Distaff clans continued at least far as the Han Dynasty (c. 300 BC-300AD). Their deity remained the Queen Mother of the West who probably was the Fu Hao of Wu Ting's era (c. 1280 BC) who had such spectacular successes in war and politics. The clan is also associated with the Taoist and Buddhist woman saint, Quan Yin . Her mantra is " Namo Shih Yin, Quan Yin, pu'sah." It translates roughly: " Beloved Guan Yin , clan of the many Fu, help us, please." (The phrase "yin shih" itself is a reference to the clan of diviners of the Shang Dynasty. The Shang Dynasty was called the Dynasty of Yin by latter peoples.

Divination declined in use among the later royal families. Divination continued among the lower ranking court attendants and the distaff clans of divination continued although very little is known about them. In symbol and myth, the primordial female archetypes stayed alive.

Traces of their rich culture are hinted at in the I Ching manuscripts of the Shang, Zhouyi, and Qin dynasties. In symbols one should be alert for pictures of baskets, especially woman carrying baskets, nets, turtles, and the phoenix, also crabs, snails and mussels.

Quan Yin, the Taoist and Buddhist saint, is frequently shown riding on the back of a turtle which symbolizes the mystical transformation in the I Ching from pre-heaven to later-heaven. Quan Yin symbolizes the element, fire, which interacts with the turtle, which represents the element water, and creates our world. For this reason, she is often depicted riding a turtle. Quan Yin is also often shown carrying a basket which represents her membership in the clan of the many Fu and the cult of Pao Hsi.