If you know any stories about her, or any good references on the subject, please send them to me. I will post the collection here, as things appear and as I have time.
Thanks!
New: I have recently added some great information to this page! Check out Cyndie-Lea Wang's Chronology of Xi Wang Mu's evolution.
lab list * home
Other names (and spellings!) of Xi Wang Mu
Hsi Wang Mu
Wang Mu Niang-Niang
Weiwobo
In Japanese, Seioubou
This image is reproduced, with permission, from Seima Takanashi's Karakuri web page. Karakuri dolls are mechanical puppets. I have paraphrased the caption.
These are mechanical dolls inspired by a story about Xi Wang Mu. One day, the story goes, she told a child to fetch the famous peaches of immortality. The child climbed the peach tree and moved from one branch to another, collecting the fruit.
The puppet was produced by Tokichi Takeda, who dedicated it to the municipality of Naka-Honmachi, Inuyama City between 1772 and 1780. The larger puppet, Xi Wang Mu, moves its fan, which signals the smaller puppet to collect the peaches.
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I started this study without even knowing her name, only her attributes, which made things extremely difficult. Fortunately, I found a fantastic site, called Sword, Spirits and Romance; The Legends of China, and contacted its author, Galen Jang, who responded with the following synopsis (the site has since disappeared, and I can't locate the author - any leads?):
Different books may spell the name differently. Most books on Chinese mythology should have something on her. She has a complicated history and her roles change throughout history.
She starts out as an animalistic goddess living on Kunlun Mountain. Then, around the time of Han Dynasty, she gradually humanizes. The stories around her are too many to tell. She tends a peach garden where the peaches mature once every thousand years. Whoever eats those peaches gains immortality. In older mythologies she had bluebirds as her servants, bringing her fruits of fire for food. In more modern times, say the last few centuries or so, she's portrayed as the wife of the Jade Emperor, the head of the celestial government, so she's a sort of empress of the universe.
Galen Jang's original website has been found archived here (Any leads on further material by him?), but I did receive the following story from Leo Daedalus, who received it from Jang.
Dong Fangshuo was a historical personage. He served under the Emperor Wu Ti of the Han Dynasty (around 2th century BC). He was a cross between an imperial adviser and a court jester. He gives out wise advise in the guise of jokes. There are many legends associated with him. He seemed to be a rationalist who didn't believe in the possibility of eternal life.
There is one story [that illustrates this point]. The emperor's alchemist succeeded in making the immortality elixir. Dong took the pill and ate it. The emperor became furious and wanted to kill him. Dong said " If the alchemist told the truth and this is truly the immortality elixir, then I am immortal and you can't kill me. If, on the other hand, the alchemist was just cheating you, then I just saved you from taking a drug of dubious effiacy. Killing me will just give you the bad reputation of a ungrateful tyrant." The emperor laughed and let him go. There are many other stories like this. There's no way to know how many of them are true.
Despite stories like this, Dong Fangshuo became associated with alchemy and immortality. I guess it's like Houdini who disbelieved in spiritualism but after his death became spiritualists' propaganda tool. Here's a story I have sitting on the desk. It's from a Jin Dynasty collection of folk stories and beliefs dating from the 3rd century AD. It is the source of the peach stealing story. I will give you a quick translation:
Han Wu Ti loved the way of xian (Taoist immortals associated with alchemy. They are not gods in the sense of governing the universe. They are beyond the gods and possess ultimate freedom). He sacrificed in many high mountains and great lakes in order to find a true xian. Then Hsi Wang Mu sent a messenger riding on a white deer to the emperor. The messenger told the emperor that Hsi Wang Mu would visit him. The emperor prepared the Chung Hua Palace to receive her. On the Seventh Hour (actually this is an archaic Chinese time unit that is shorter than a hour, but this is just a quick translation) of the seventh night of the seventh month of the year, Hsi Wang Mu rode the Purple Cloud Carriage and landed on the southwest side of the palace. She sat facing the east. On her head she wore the Qi Shen (I don't know what that is, but it's some kind of woman's hair piece). Azure vapors hovered above her. There were three blue birds the size of large crows. (Those were supposed to be Hsi Wang Mu's followers - kind of like Odin's two ravens. They are supposed to have three legs instead of the usual two for birds). The three birds sat by Wang Mu's side.
The Emperor lighted the Chiu Wei Lantern. He sat at the east of the palace and faced west. Wang Mu took seven peaches. She gave five to the emperor and took two for herself. After the emperor finished eating, he took the pits of the peaches and put them in front of his knees. Wang Mu smiled and asked why the emperor was keeping the pits. The emperor said that he loved the succulent taste of the peaches and wished to plant the pits. Hsi Wang Mu smiled and said "This species of peach trees gives out fruits once every three thousand years."
At the time, the emperor and Hsi Wang Mu were alone. None of the courtiers and servants were allowed to enter. However, Dong Fangshuo was secretly peeking through a window with carvings of red birds located in the southern corner of the palace. Hsi Wang Mu discovered him, and said to the emperor, "This little one who is looking at us, he stole my peaches three times." The emperor is much amazed.
From that day on, the people believed that Dong Fangshuo was xian.
Galen mentions that the source is Journey to the West written around the Yuan Dynasty, and that there is a very good translation done by Anthony Yu and published by University of Chicago Press
Notes from
An Iconographic Study of Xi Wang Mu
(the Queen Mother of the West) in Han Art
by Gu Sen, China Institute of Art; Kuiyi Shen, Ohio State University
The earliest possible reference to Xi Wang Mu (the Queen Mother of the West) occurs in the Shang period in China. Since then, Xi Wang Mu evolved from an immortal to one of most important female deities in the history of Chinese mythology and one of the major deities of Taoism.
(More quotes from this material pending permission to reproduce)
A Xi Wang Mu Chronology
by Cyndie-Lea WangShang Dynasty
The beast, as described in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, 'Shan Hai Jing'
Zhou Dynasty
(although some scholars argue this was written as late as the Han)
She is a queen who meets the Emperor of the Zhou. She has a bowl of peaches set before him and tells him they would bring him immortality if he ate them. He asks for one and she laughs and says he is not ready for immortality. He spends the night with her and returns to his kingdom setting his best alchemists to find an elixir of eternal life. He dies after consuming one of these elixirs.
Han Dynasty
A historical text notes that fields were blighted and a plague was spreading across the kingdom. It was believed that Xi Wang Mu was flying over the country taking the souls of the weak and leaving a trail of corpses. Many peasants wore amulets with her image on it to show that they were one of hers in hopes that she would pass over them and spare their life. The emperor was encouraged to set up a shrine to Xi Wang Mu and make offerings to her, which he did.There is a story that Xi Wang Mu came to the court of the Han emperor Wu Di and offered him some peaches and spent the night with him in his palace. She is very demur in this story, very different from the woman who met the Zhou emperor.
Wei, Jin, and North and South Dynasties
The period where Taoism began to seriously develop as a religion practiced by peasant groups and elites. Many myths of Xi Wang Mu evolved at this time with little consistency. Most died out, and a few survived and cropped up in later times. Some depicted her as neither human nor deity as she had no beginning and no end. Some depicted her as a mortal woman who perfected the Tao within her and became immortal. Many depict her as a Goddess with many daughters (anywhere from 7-24) and the stories tend to revolve around her daughters' adventures when their watchful mother is momentarily preoccupied.
Tang Dynasty
The mother becomes the teacher and the children are her disciples. An unprecedented number of women dedicated themselves to Xi Wang Mu and ask her to be their teacher and guide. They affectionately called her A-Mah which is what a child would call her nanny or wetnurse. Most of the records about these Taoist women are focused on two groups, courtesans and princesses. The best poets of the time (and arguably of Chinese history) sought the favors of the courtesans and therefore wrote many beautiful verses about Xi Wang Mu and her female attendants/disciples in attempts to woo them.Princesses by virtue of royal birth had all their exploits recorded. It's unclear whether the worship of Xi Wang Mu was popular among other groups of women, but simply not preserved. It seems that most peasant and middle class women choose the bodhisattva Kuan Yin as the object of their devotion because she was more a granter of wishes who demanded nothing in return. Susanne Cahill's book Transcendence and Divine Passion focuses on Xi Wang Mu worship at this time. As you can imagine XWM is depicted as a refined and regal matron leading her young apprentices to the Tao.
It was at this time that she was said to have once been a mortal woman who learned the secrets of sexual alchemy (literally sucking the lives out of men while having intercourse with them) and took the lives of 1,000 young men to achieve immortality. It further cautions that these secrets must therefore be kept from women at all costs. I think this has a great deal to do with the fact that many of her devotees were prostitutes, literate, and not beholden to any man.
After the Tang Dynasty...
...women's culture began to sink into obscurity (influenced by waves of invasions from the North and Northeast that in turn gave rise to and supported Neo Confucianism and it's strong censure of women) and Xi Wang Mu did too. In the Ming dynasty a novelist wrote down an old story tellers tale that is based on the real story of the Tang dynasty monk who journeys to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures. The story tellers embellished this story with many ghosts, demons, and other fantastic creatures. The star was the Monkey King. In the novel Journey to the West the Monkey King is in the palace of the Jade Emperor (the emperor of heaven) and breaks into Xi Wang Mu's peach garden and eats all of her peaches. Xi Wang Mu (who is either the wife or concubine of the Jade Emperor) whines and complains to her husband who then punishes the Monkey King by imprisoning him under a mountain where he stays for several hundred years until Kuan Yin takes pity on him and frees him. In return he is to accompany the monk to India and see no harm comes to him.
By Late Imperial Times...
...Xi Wang Mu is nothing but the nagging wife of the heavenly emperor. I went to the White Cloud temple in Beijing which is the main Taoist temple there, and also the site of the Taoist Institute, and wandered around the many altars looking for Xi Wang Mu's so I could pay my respects. I couldn't find it. I asked a young Taoist priest where her altar was and he thought about it for a while and then said "Oh! You mean Concubine Queen Mother [the name she is called in Journey to the West - 'Wang Mu Niang Niang']. She is a minor deity and has no altar here, but her husband's altar is over there. He can do you more good anyway." *sigh* Apparently her worship has re-ignited in Taiwan and there are many groups devoted to her there. Someday I hope to go there and research that.
I received an email from Corie that reads:
The book, The Sexual Teachings of the White Tigress, by Hsi Lai, deals with the Taoist White Tigresses. A lot of the practices they follow are from a book called Hsi Wang Mu Nan Tsin Ching Pi Chieh (Western Royal Mother's Precious Secrets for Absorbing Male Sexual Energy). In Hsi Lai's book, he makes many references and uses many quotes from Hsi Wang Mu's book.
While I haven't personally read this book, I'm told that if you're looking for information on Xi Wang Mu, it doesn't contain that much about her in particular. It is considered by my source to be worth reading, and it does show one possible road devotion to this deity can take.