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EAST ASIAN MYTHOLOGY MEME: [9/9] CHINESE GODS AND GODDESSES | XIWANG MU

XiWang Mu [Queen Mother of the West, The Western Mother, Hsi Wang Mu, Seiobo (Japan)]  is the Chinese Goddess of Immortality.

In her most ancient form, Xiwang Mu was a wild-haired human-faced female with tigers’ teeth and a leopard’s tail. She lived in a cave where three-footed birds fed her and from which she sent forth disease and death. She controlled the world’s water, withholding or loosing floods at her will. This early form of Xiwang Mu has been interpreted as a goddess of wilderness. She has also been called a goddess of shamans, because of the headdress and tigers’ teeth she wore, both associated with shamanic costume. Later, Xiwang Mu appeared as a beautiful ageless woman dispensing peaches that, mixed with ashes of mulberry trees, cured human disease. She lived with her sister, attended upon by the deities of immortality. On remote Jade Mountain, Xiwang Mu lived in a golden palace where every 3,000 years, she threw herself a birthday party. On that occasion a peach tree ripened, providing the fruit of immortality. Three green birds and a nine-tailed fox served her. Her messenger was the bluebird and her familiar, the long-lived tortoise.

Xiwang Mu was the goddess of female energy, the essence of yin and the ruler of individual female beings. As goddess of the west, she was associated with the setting sun, the waning moon, the year in autumn, the death of a soul into afterlife.