妈祖-讲演

思维导图

正文

Mazuism

Thank you so much and good morning, everyone. I am lsy, a year three student of SSE colloge. and I am from Fujian province. My topic today is a widely spread worship called Mazuism, which is mainly about the worship of Mazu. Mazu is regarded as a female patron god of the sea, and this patron god has an origin of a historical figure, Lin, Moniang.

For the second part, The history of Mazuism is quite simple. The original name of Mazu, Moniang had a traditional meaning in Chinese. Mo was a meaning a state of speechless, and niang had a meaing of younger daughter in ancient Chinese. Thus Moniang is referred to a slient younger daugther of the family. The story itself was very simple. This girl used to act as a witch in her village, and died after her helping people out of a shipwrecking at her youth. Then people got deeply touched on her great deed, so they overtook this girl as a god of the sea.

As for the third part, We might find that this character was much more simplier than Posisen. Actually Mazu has always been regarded as a patron god of the sea. The first reason is that traditionally Chinese people always overtook a person who had done a great deed as a god after his or her death, and Lin, Moniang had this feat to make people remembered. The second reason is that at that time the government of ancient China had distriuted some policies towards navigation, and sea traveling got much more frequent towards all parts of China and Southern Asia. The people was so willing to travel, but was also afraid of shipwreching and other sorts of disasters in the sea. So they needed a god to boost their spirits while traveling.

Due to the time limits, I will briefly concluded the fourth part of this topic. Mazu was believed to have a lot messengers. They show typical singals of different weathers to people. For instance, if you see a butterfly standing on the deck, then it was a messenger of Mazu. She used this butterfly to indicate a good weather for traveling. Actually, it contained lots of mechanism for a butterfly to stand on a deck. But as we all know that even today, weather is always playing an important part on naviagtion, and people just needed this sort of explanation to comfort themselves. And this showed their pieces of knowledge and understadings on navigation of ancient Chinese people.