Nuiva is a goddess who descended to Earth when it was still uninhabited. The element "nyu" means "woman", the element "va" is difficult to decipher. The American sinologist E. Schaefer hypothetically interprets “va” as “frog,” believing that originally N.-v. could be revered as the spirit of rain puddles, represented in the form of wet, slippery creatures. The Chinese scientist Wen Yi-do etymologized the name N.-v. as the female hypostasis of the gourd, which ties in with the myths widespread among the peoples of East and Southeast Asia about the miraculous birth of the first ancestors from a pumpkin.
She had the head and upper body of a beautiful woman, and the lower half of a snake. Nüwa sculpted the first people from clay. Having created several clay men with her own hands, she got tired and created the rest of humanity in a simpler way - by dipping a rope into clay slurry and shaking off lumps from it, which, touching the ground, turned into people.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru