The provenance file on Fúxī
Catalogue entry — Fúxī. Every claim below carries its chain of custody.
Provenance
1. The attestation. 伏羲 — "Hidden one". On record: I Ching, Shiji, Birrell, Chinese classics.
2. The preserved evidence. u → ú (Stress on u); i → ī (Long vowel) — absent from the ASCII form fuxi, present in the restoration, verifiable against the sources above.
3. The narrative record. Reading the World — The Yìjīng's Great Treatise records the founding act: Fúxī looked up and contemplated the images of heaven, looked down and contemplated the patterns of earth, contemplated the markings of birds and beasts and the order of the near at hand — and from all three made the eight trigrams, "to comprehend the powers of the spirits and to classify the natures of the ten thousand things. " Writing, mathematics, and divination begin as one gesture of attention. The Dragon-Horse's Map — Later tradition gives the revelation a courier: a dragon-horse rose from the Yellow River bearing on its back the Hétú, the River Chart — the arrangement of numbers and marks from which Fúxī drew the trigrams. Paired with the Luò River Writing that inspired the Great Plan, the Chart made the Yellow River itself the first text of Chinese civilization.
4. The physical record. The Wu Liang shrine reliefs (2nd century CE, Shandong) show Fúxī and Nǚwā with serpent bodies entwined, square and compass raised — the canonical image, replicated across Han tomb art from Sichuan to Xinjiang (the famous Astana cemetery banner). The myth's textual archaeology runs from the Zhuangzi and Xunzi mentions to the Tang's flood-cycle records: a steady accretion from sage-king to cosmic progenitor, all preserved in the transmitted classics.
5. The current holding. The temple at /sites/fuxi/, classified Tier 1. What survives here cannot be shown in ASCII: a feature of the original that the fallback alphabet flattens. That is the Tier-1 test, and this name passes it without argument.
6. The documented resonances. Education, Research & Knowledge, Software, Cloud & Developer Infrastructure, Astrology, Tarot & Esoteric Services — seats argued and weighted in the pattern atlas, read through the myths in this temple's Resonance File.
7. The primary sources. Tao Te Ching — the library this file answers to, open at the Sacred Texts collection.
8. The continuing record. Every reading of the Yìjīng — the book that shaped Confucian statecraft, Daoist alchemy, and Leibniz's binary arithmetic — begins with his act of looking. The eight trigrams appear on the flag of South Korea; the River Chart structures a millennium of cosmological diagrams; and "Fúxī" remains the standard icon for the inventor-ancestor in Chinese cultural memory, the answer to the question of where pattern-thinking began.
At a Glance
- Restored name: Fúxī
- ASCII form: fuxi
- Meaning: "Hidden one"
- Domain of influence: Culture, Writing, Divination
- Pantheon: Chinese
- Classification: Tier 1
- Original script: 伏羲
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 87 of 287
The File Continues
Read the founding dispatch for the name's full story, the Resonance File for the archetype at work — or the whole archive in one sitting.
Continue the series — previous file: Fūjin (read it here) · next file: Gaîa (read it here).
The Restoration Files are written from the same canonical record as the temples themselves: the lexicon, the lore catalog, the pattern atlas, and the cited scholarly sources. If a file ever disagrees with its temple, the temple is right — tell us, and the file will be corrected.