The pantheon · The Celestial Bureaucracy
Queen Mother of the West
西王母 · Xiwangmu (Wade-Giles: Hsi-wang-mu)
Daoist
High goddess of the West and of immortality
The high goddess of the West and of immortality, keeper of the peaches of long life. Her earliest form was fearsome; later tradition refined her into a serene celestial sovereign.
- Portfolio
- Immortality · The West · The peaches of long life
- Observance
- In some communities her peach-banquet is marked on the third day of the third lunar month.
How to recognise them
She is shown as a stately court lady in Tang-style robes, phoenixes and cranes about her, a branch or basket of peaches at hand, sometimes with a headdress bearing her emblem. Her earliest scriptural form, by contrast, is described with tiger's teeth, a leopard's tail and wild hair — the same goddess, an age apart.
Xiwangmu (Hsi-wang-mu, 西王母), the Queen Mother of the West, is one of the oldest deities in the Chinese record — and one of the most transformed. In the Classic of Mountains and Seas she appears as a wild, awesome power of the far west, marked by tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail, presiding over plague and cosmic punishment.
By the medieval period she had become something quite different: the highest goddess of the Daoist heavens, mistress of immortality, dwelling on the Kunlun mountains beside a lake where the peaches of long life ripen once in several thousand years. To be granted one of her peaches was to be received among the immortals.
Later vernacular fiction, above all Journey to the West, fixed the popular image of her as the gracious hostess of the Peach Banquet — the version most Western readers meet first. It is a genuine part of her story, but it is the late and gentle end of a very long development, not the beginning.
Held together, the two faces make the more interesting figure: a goddess who governs both the giving of long life and the older, harder powers of the west, and whom the tradition itself reshaped across more than a thousand years of writing and worship.
Nearby
Written from
- Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China — Suzanne E. Cahill, Stanford University Press, 1993
- Shanhaijing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas)
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