by Brian Griffith
After the first emperor conquered the whole Middle Kingdom in 221 BCE, China usually remained an empire under varying degrees of martial law. People were then ranked by their value to the rulers, and given privileges or restrictions accordingly. Women were generally regarded as existing to serve more powerful men. According to Pan Shaoping, “in the post-Qin centralized autocratic society [after 207 BCE], the partnership life of the male and the female … was the stuff of myths and legends, and the memory of remote antiquity was no more than a spiritual consolation in the face of reality” (Sun and Pan, 1995, 238).
So the dominators of China tried to supplant and subordinate all ancient village cultures. The villagers, however, were resilient, comparing themselves to bamboo. Their memories of a pre-militarized world lived on, like dreams indelibly printed inside their eyelids. Both peasants and learned people commonly idealized their vanished past. Onto the slate of antiquity they projected their fondest dreams. Where memory and vision combined, the legendary Golden Age emerged. So in the chaotic period after the fall of the Han dynasty (ca. 300s CE), Bao Jingyan claimed to clearly recall,
Who could prove such memories false? Where did these legends come from if not inherited memory, passed on by grandparents in bedtime stories?
So the Golden Age became an historical memory, a living ideal, and a vision of the future. It was the goal of psychological unity with the source of life. It was the lost tenderness between mother and child, around which the world should turn. It was a real time in the not-so-distant past, with known traditions and moral standards, by which the present age would be judged.
According to popular legend, the Queen Mother of the West came to the court of Han Emperor Wu in 110 BCE to deliver her judgment against him. This emperor had launched victorious wars against the barbarians, building the might of China to rival that of Rome. He had adopted an official version of Confucianism as the state religion, in which the main moral teaching was for subjects to serve their superiors. In his political and spiritual roles, Emperor Wu would be roughly equivalent to the combined figures of Roman emperors Augustus and Constantine. And to this great figure, the goddess reportedly said, “You were born licentious, extravagant, and violent; and you live in the midst of blood and forceno matter how many Daoists you invite here in hopes of immortality, you will only wear yourself out” (Cleary, 1989, 3–4). Maybe that suggests something about the role of women’s religions in Chinese history.
The Chinese age of the goddess probably began over 7,000 years ago, and it continues in the crowded streets today. It is not just an archaeological corpse to be disinterred and studied, the way we study ancient Crete. It’s a living heritage of dreams and values which will shape the future. The Chinese perennial vision of a restored earthly paradise is unique in form and style. But it’s also part of a dream unfolding across the planet.
(from CHINESE GODDESSES, by Brian Griffith, Exterminating Angel Press Spring 2012)