144 Field Museum of Natural History — Anth., Vol. X. 



in plaster in the Field Museum and are here reproduced on Plate 

 XVII. 1 



The deity of Earth occupies a prominent place in the religion of the 

 ancient Chinese and yields in importance only to Shang-ti, "the Em- 

 peror Above," the ruler of Heaven. It is simply called Vu and some- 

 times ti "Earth" and frequently characterized by the attribute hou, 

 meaning a sovereign. The sex is not expressed by this word; a sharp 

 distinction between male and female deities does not occur in the 

 oldest religious concept of China where anthropomorphic notions were 

 but weakly developed. Primarily, Earth was neither a distinctively 

 female nor a distinctively male deity, but rather sexless; nevertheless, 

 it falls under the category of yin, the negative, dark, female principle, 

 as already indicated in the Book of Mutations (Yi king) where the 

 notion of yin is defined as the action of Earth (yin ti tao). Jit is cer- 

 tainly doubtful whether the word yin conveyed in the beginning a 

 clear sex-notion which may be regarded as a philosophical abstraction 

 of later times; but there is no doubt that the combination yin yang 

 signified the combined action of Heaven and Earth in the production 

 and transformation of beings, or the creative power of these two great 

 forces. In the sacrifices to the deity Earth, all paraphernalia are derived 

 from the sphere of yin, and the jade image of the deity symbolizing its 

 shape doubtless partakes also of the character of the female element. 



It has been emphasized that only under the Han dynasty (b. c. 

 /£- 206-221 a. d.) the word hou adopted the meaning of "princess, em- 

 press," and that first in a hymn of that period the deity Earth is con- 

 ceived of as female and is designated definitely as "the fertile mother." 2 

 Only as late as under the Emperor Wu (b. c. 140-87), the cult of the 

 Empress Earth is instituted at Fen-yin where she was adored under the 

 statue of a woman. 3 But this action does not prove that the deity has 

 been considered a male previously; it only means the termination of a 

 long-continued development, the final official sanction manifestly 

 expressed by this imperial approval of a general popular feeling pre- 

 sumably cherished for centuries. An important deity occupying to 

 a large extent the minds of the people does not change in a day from a 



^he Ku yu t'u p'u (Ch. 8-10) gives a wonderfully rich selection of these four 

 symbols in all varieties decorated with all sorts of impossible ornaments. It would 

 be a waste of time to discuss these bold forgeries of the Sung period. No ancient 

 text nor any of the older commentaries contain a word about these pieces having 

 ever been decorated. In the symbols of Earth, the faux pas has been committed 

 of drawing instead of the circular perforated disk a solid quadrangle; of course, also 

 the Sung artists knew that the earth was square, — mats du sublime au ridicule il 

 n'y a pas un pas. 



2 W. Grube, Religion und Kultus der Chinesen, p. 35. 



3 Chavannes, Le T'ai Chan, p. 524. 



