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1 A god in formation
Zhenwu was originally Xuanwu. To avoid the personal name of the [imperial] Holy Patriarch [which contains the word xuan,] he is therefore called Zhenwu. … The shapes of the constellations Xu and Wei [in the northern sky] are similar to the snake and the turtle, therefore the north is referred to as Xuanwu of the seven stars.… At present, people take Xuanwu to be a perfected saint and make [images of a] real turtle and snake beneath him. This is ridiculous enough. In addition, they added the perfected lords of Tianpeng, Tianyou, and Yisheng [with Zhenwu] to form the Four Saints.
真武本玄武, 避聖祖諱, 故曰真武… 此本虚危星形似之故，因而名北方為玄武七星… 今乃以玄武為真聖而作真龜蛇於下，已無義理，而又增天蓬天猷及翊聖真君作四聖.
Zhu Xi 朱熹, Conversations of Master Zhu (Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類125.30b).
The turtle: a cosmological symbol
Traditionally, it was asserted that Zhenwu, as an anthropomorphic deity, was directly linked to, if not identical with, the main constellations in the northern sky, Xuanwu, that were depicted in the form of a turtle or a turtle encircled by a snake. Modern scholarship, until two decades ago, also embraced the theory that the veneration of Zhenwu in Song and later times was a direct evolution of a stellar cult of Xuanwu from classical times (for example, Hsü 1947; Huang Zhaohan 1988). New research, however, has begun to challenge this long held wisdom. Romeyn Taylor first describes the connection between the two as “tenuous” (1990: 154–155). Pierre-Henry de Bruyn (1997) asserted that only the shared name and emblems support the assumed mutation from one to the other.
Taylor and de Bruyn are correct in unveiling the objective truth of the origin of Zhenwu. However, regardless of how dubious the connection was, this assumed origin of Zhenwu has been accepted as an established fact in the minds of his devotees and critics alike. Zhu Xi’s (1130–1200) disparaging comments, cited above, is an example. The belief of Zhenwu’s identity as a cosmological symbol was the inspiration for the principal characteristics and interpretations of his godhead from Song times to the present. And his cosmological significance was most often theorized through his relation to the stellar Xuanwu. Understanding of the assumed astral origin of Zhenwu therefore is indispensible in reconstructing the god’s images and worship in the historical landscape.
The dark/black celestial turtle image
The term Xuanwu was coined by two characters: xuan, which denotes dark or deep, and wu, conventionally rendered into English as “martial” or “warrior.” According to the eminent classicist Kong Yingda 孔穎達 (574–648), the turtle’s hard shell resembled armor and thus symbolized the qualities of protection and defense (Liji zhushu 3.13b). The turtle therefore connoted the martial quality or wu 武. Most commentators on the classics, with one exception, associated Xuanwu with the turtle.
The term Xuanwu appeared in the Western Han (206 BCE–CE 24) in the verse “Roaming Far Away” (Yuanyou 遠遊). Modern scholarship in general has determined the author to be Sima Xiangru 司馬相如(179–117 BCE) or one of his contemporaries (Hawkes 1985: 191–192; Kroll: 1996; Mair 2001: 228), but traditionally the verse was credited to the legendary tragic litterateur Qu Yuan 屈原(ca. 340–278 BCE) of the Warring States period (476–221 BCE). The poem demonstrates not only a high degree of literary skill but also erudition in mythological tradition in the account of an ecstatic journey to heaven. En route, the poet-protagonist was accompanied by a veritable entourage of mythical figures, including Xuanwu.
“Roaming Far Away” was published in the Elegies of Chu (Chuci 楚辭), an anthology of works from southern China compiled, edited, and annotated by Wang Yi 王逸(ca. CE 89–158). Wang Yi maintained, in this particular context, that Xuanwu referred to the “great yin god” (Taiyin shen 太陰神), who was either the Moon or the Year Star (suixing 歲星).1 However, when commenting on another piece in the Elegies of Chu, the “Nine Regrets” (Jiuhuai 九懷), which he attributed to Wang Bao 王褒(fl. 74–49 BCE) of the Western Han, Wang Yi defined Xuanwu as “celestial turtle” (tiangui 天龜; see Chuci zhangju 15.7). Was Wang Yi a meticulous commentator who gave alternate meanings of Xuanwu based on usage during different time periods, and aware that the astral name was not used for the symbol of a turtle until the Western Han? After all, to Wang Yi’s mind, “Roaming Far Away” was one of Qu Yuan’s pieces written in the Warring States period while the “Nine Regrets” was a work composed two centuries later in the Western Han period.
By the Eastern Han, the Xuanwu symbol in visual representation appeared in two different patterns: a solitary turtle and a turtle encircled by a snake (see figure 1.1).2 The insertion of a snake into the symbol corresponded with the contemporaneous perception that the snake was the turtle in the male form, a taxonomical theory that the authoritative lexicologist Xu Shen 許慎(ca. CE 58–147) advanced in his monumental dictionary of CE 121.3 According to Xu Shen, all turtles were female and all snakes were male. Or, to put in a different way, the turtle and snake are the same species; the former is female and the latter male. While the actual belief that the turtle and the snake were of the same species was abandoned long ago, the iconographic pattern of an entangled snake and turtle survives to the present day and has replaced the unitary image of the turtle.
Figure 1.1 A tile with the design of a turtle encircled by a snake, Eastern Han dynasty.
Source: © Wikimedia commons.
The celestial dark turtle was also the symbol by which the ancient Chinese depicted the constellations of the northern sky. In the “Monograph on Celestial Offices” (Tianguan shu天官書) of the Grand History (Shiji 史記), Sima Qian 司馬遷(ca. BCE 145–90) synthesized the astronomic–astrological scholarship known in his time and presented the first systematic description of the Chinese night sky. He recounted the constellations in terms of the classical astrological framework of five “palaces” (gong 宮): a Central Palace being surrounded by the East Palace of the Azure Dragon (donggong canglong 東宮蒼龍), the South Palace of the Vermilion Bird (nangong zhuniao 南宮朱鳥), the Western Palace of the Harmony Pond (xigong xianchi 西宮咸池), and Northern Palace of Xuanwu.4 The two principal stellar patterns, or xiu 宿 (lit. lodgers),5 which constituted the North Palace, were Xu 虛 and Wei 危. The Book of Han (Hanshu 漢書) remains faithful to the same structure in describing the nocturnal sky. This five-palace model was evidentially the standard perception of the nocturnal firmament in China throughout the first century CE. Thus, in the beginning, Xuanwu was a creature of the immaterial world, with an astronomical connection and such human characteristics as the martial spirit which were embedded in its name.
The Four Animals
The Record of Rites (Liji 禮記), a Confucian classic compiled in the late Western Han period but consisting of materials from the Warring States period, provides another ideographical quartet that was similar but not identical to the astronomical symbols in the Grand History and the Book of Han: Xuanwu was teamed together with a vermilion bird, an azure dragon (referred to as qinglong 青龍), and a white tiger (baihu 白虎).6 The symbols were painted on military banners, rear, left, right, and front, in order to organize military units. They were referred as the Four Animals (sishou 四獸) by the time of the Eastern Han.7 The Xuanwu symbol further accumulated cosmological significance as the Four Animals made their way into the correlative cosmology of the Five Phases that prevailed in the Han political and intellectual milieu.
Chinese cosmology is based on “correlative thinking” (Graham 1989: 319–325; also see Puett 2002: 16–19, 145–200). Correlative cosmology connects human affairs with patterns in nature and combines them into one classification system. Elements grouped in the same category, whether phenomenal or non-phenomenal, are believed to correspond with one another faithfully and predictably in accordance with the principles of “cosmic resonance,” or ganying 感應(Henderson 1984: 20). As the Huainan zi 淮南子 of the second century BCE states “things within the same class mutually move each other” (Huainan zi 3.2a; Major 1993: 65 n.27). The most popular classification system of correlative cosmology since the Warring States period was the system of the five categories: water, fire, wood, metal, and earth.8 After a long process of synthesis, this single all-encompassing classification system, generally referred to as the Five Phases (wuxing 五行), grouped practically every aspect of human civilization and natural phenomena. The Four Animals serving as directional indicators were naturally incorporated into the scheme. A fifth component, which varied in different sources, was added to complete the set of five, as showing in, for example, the Huainan zi:9
The East is Wood. … Its animal is the azure dragon. … The South is Fire.… Its animal is the vermilion bird.… The Center is Earth.… Its animal is the yellow dragon. … The West is Metal.… Its animal is the white tiger. … The North is Water. Its animal is Xuanwu. Its musical note is yu. His days are ren and gui.
東方木也…其獸蒼龍,南方火也,…其獸朱鳥,…中央土也,其獸黄龍,…西方金也, 其獸白虎, … 北方水也, …, 其獸玄武, 其音羽, 其日壬癸。
Xuanwu was the animal of the north assigned to the category of water, and accordingly was associated with other aspects in the water category, in the sense of mutual response or “resonance.”
With their connection to the Five Phases cosmology, the Four Animals were used to create the cosmic frame of an orderly universe. In inferring the meaningfulness and organization of the sky, Zhang Heng 張衡(CE 78–139) wrote in his “Spiritual Constitution of the Universe” (Lingxian 靈憲):
The stars are formally generated in the earth and germinally formed in the sky. …The azure dragon twirls at the left, the white tiger fiercely occupies the right, the vermillion bird extends its wings in the front, the spiritual turtle (linggui) turns over its head at the back, and the yellow god Xuanyuan is at the central.
星也者，體生於地，精成於天… 蒼龍連蜷於左，白虎猛據於右，朱雀奮翼於前，靈龜圈首於後，黃神軒轅於中.
Here, Zhang Heng used the Four Animals to represent the four sections surrounding the center division of the sky occupied by Xuanyuan 軒轅, whom Zhang Heng identified with the yellow god but is more commonly referred to as the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi 黃帝). Instead of using the four cardinal directions, Zhang used the right, left, front and rear, just like the paragraph in the Book of Rites cited above. The vast metaphysical sky became comprehensible and meaningful to humans only after it was organized or “civilized” by human power.
On a brick tomb in Yi’nan 沂南dated between the second and third centuries, the Four Animals were engraved around a monstrous figure in chamber no. 1 (see figure 1.2), the front room immediately preceding the hallway open to the south. The monstrous figure, on the wall opposite the door, carries five weapons, identifying him as Chiyou 蚩尤(Shandong Yinan Han mu hua xiang shi, 2001, p. 79 and illustrations nos. 12, 13, and 14). Above Chiyou’s head is a vigorous bird with wings outstretched and below him is a turtle glancing at a snake coiled around it. A tiger and a dragon appear on the west and east walls next to Chiyou respectively. From Chiyou’s viewpoint on the north wall, the dragon is on the left and the tiger on the right. The top always corresponds with the front, and the bottom with the rear. Chiyou, as modern scholars have argued, was a symbolic double of Xuanyuan, the Yellow Emperor (Lewis 1990: 185; Puett 1998). This brick engraving is virtually a graphic reproduction of the short paragraph from Zhang Heng’s “Spiritual Constitution of the Universe” cited above.
Figure 1.2 The Four Animals in a tomb in Yi’nan, Shandong province. Eastern Han dynasty.
Source: Drawn by Edyth Kuciapa, based on Shandong Yi’nan Huamu.
Zhang Heng’s verse and the Yi’nan tomb engraving are representations of the same idea but in different media, one literary and the other pictorial. They share the concept that an orientation frame is formed by the insertion of the Four Animals. Only after the frame is formed can the center be located. With the Four Animals as reference points, the focus point—the loci of the high deity—is created. Thus we find in the Master who Embraces Simplicity (Baopu zi) by Ge Hong 葛洪(CE 283–343) that Lord Lao, the deified Laozi and the single highest divinity in Daoism until the Supreme Clarity revelations in CE 364, was surrounded by the Four Animals in multiple forms (Baopu zi 3.43a).
The cosmological significance of the Four Animals during the Han dynasty is further underscored by their incorporation into the TLV mirrors that were popular at the time (Lien-sheng Yang 1947; Cammann 1948). These mirrors are so named by modern scholars for the marks on the back that resemble the shapes of the letters T, L, and V. In addition to its so-named marks, the TLV mirror design often includes a square pattern in the middle and the Four Animals surrounding the square. The square symbolizes the earth, and the roundness of the mirror symbolizes the sky in accordance with the traditional concept of “round heaven and square earth.” TLV mirrors were often found buried in coffins near the heads of the deceased. Scholars have long debated the design of such mirrors and the purpose of burying them with the deceased. Michael Loewe argues that the pattern is essentially a reproduction of the diviner’s board (shi 式), which in turn was a reproduction of heaven and earth. By placing it in the coffin, th...
