Gods and Spirits on Tihu Hall Notes

Folk Cthulhu Horror: Why Is His Back Covered with Eyes?

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:23:31 +0800

💡 Introduction:
When people enter a temple to pay their respects, the first figure they usually see is the smiling Budai Monk. But if you stand in an empty hall and stare at him for thirty seconds, does that smile begin to feel a little too perfect, a little too uncanny? Behind this most familiar “auspicious symbol” there may be a hidden legend erased by official history, and at its core, a deeply unsettling form of Chinese-style Cthulhu horror.

Nüqing: The Hidden Official Who Vanished from the Daoist Pantheon

Sun, 21 Nov 2021 00:05:45 +0800

The Daoist pantheon did not gradually form a complete system until the Northern Song. This process showed itself mainly in several ways. First, the final ranking of the highest Daoist deities was eventually fixed. Before that, the order among the Three Pure Ones, especially the relative honor given to Primordial Beginning Heavenly Worthy and the Supreme Lord Lao, had never truly stabilized. Second, the borrowing and absorption of Buddhist concepts became systematic. Ideas such as the underworld and the Eighteen Hells had already sunk deep into popular consciousness and were therefore incorporated into Daoism. Third, Daoism retained many gods of older worship, such as City Gods and Earth Gods. Fourth, the proportion and influence of popular gods, figures transmitted in the folk sphere and then absorbed into Daoism and granted divine status, grew ever larger: Lord Guan, Lü Dongbin, Wang Lingguan, Mazu, Zhang Sanfeng, and many others.

Supplement on the Grand Duke: There Are Two Jiang Ziyas in Investiture of the Gods, and One of Them Deifies Himself

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 23:19:45 +0800

Most people know Jiang Ziya from Investiture of the Gods. The influence of that novel has been so immense that even divine figures wholly invented within it, Hongjun Patriarch for example, were later posthumously elevated by some temples and given statues for worship. Xu Zhonglin’s prose is admittedly rather poor, assuming Xu Zhonglin really was the author, which is no more certain than it is for the Four Great Novels. The plot is full of holes, and as literature it falls short. Yet because the materials connected with the Chinese divine world are so vast, and because the author truly did put enormous labor into assembling them, later readers who began to infer and investigate discovered a wealth of details. In that respect, it is no less rewarding than reading Journey to the West through a scholarly lens.

Bao Liang

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 00:01:45 +0800

After the Song, Daoism’s immense and unruly pantheon began to take on stable shape. The Taiqing and Lingbao traditions, among others, compromised with one another, and under the influence of the Song imperial house the ranks of the immortals were gradually fixed. At the summit stood the Three Pure Ones, the Four Sovereigns, the King Father of the East, and the Queen Mother of the West.

The Queen Mother of the West had, so far as records tell us, more than twenty daughters. One of the younger ones was called Lady Taizhen. She married Wang Youzi, the True King of Xuandu Taizhen. Wang Youzi originally held what amounted to an enviable central-government post, but after mishandling some affair he was demoted to become Lord of the Eastern Peak. In that age Buddhism had not yet entered China, so there was still no King Yama and no Eighteen Hells. The Lord of the Eastern Peak, who governed the underworld and its passages to the unseen realm, was in fact a very promising office. Lady Taizhen moved with her husband’s change of post, and so came to be known as the Lady of the Eastern Peak. She bore a son of thoroughly bad reputation, the famous Third Son of Mount Tai. We will leave him aside for now.

Anqi Sheng

Sat, 06 Nov 2021 00:53:45 +0800

Xie Lingyun of the Eastern Jin once wrote a poem, “Climbing the Islet in Mid-River,” which includes these lines: