Nuwa and Fuxi had human heads and snake bodies. Perhaps most people only knew that this was how they were described in mythology.
They assumed that, as the ancestors of human civilization, they must have looked just like modern humans. The human heads and snake bodies were merely mythical distortions of them.
But Mo Qiong knew for certain that "human heads and snake bodies" was still putting it too simply.
People imagined that they had no legs, with their lower bodies directly becoming snake tails, but that was not the case.
In Han dynasty excavations of Fuxi and Nuwa statues and tomb carvings, they had human heads and snake bodies, but their abdomens also bore claws resembling those of reptiles such as crocodiles and lizards, while their fronts and backs were covered in numerous scales.
In other words, they still had four limbs. The snake body merely meant that they had an additional snake tail.
Fuxi and Nuwa were not the only ones depicted this way. Numerous Han dynasty tomb carvings also featured Chang'e flying to the moon paintings and depictions of the Queen Mother of the West. Chang'e and the Queen Mother of the West both had large snake tails, just like Nuwa.
In particular, modern myths had never mentioned that Chang'e also had a human head and snake body.
Her racial form, completely identical to Nuwa's, had been thoroughly forgotten.
Only archaeological excavations revealed that Han dynasty people still remembered that Chang'e had Nuwa's form.
And this was a depiction from the later Han dynasty. In earlier Pre-Qin depictions, she did not even have a human head and could only be considered human-faced.
In the Pre-Qin ceramic statues of Nuwa and Fuxi unearthed in Shaanxi—in other words, the Guanzhong region—they had, in addition to abdominal claws and snake