Religious beliefs of the Shang dynasty

Sources and limitations

The Shang religion did not rely on any scriptures to narrate its faith.^[2] Modern scholarship instead understands it through oracle bone inscriptions, which act as the main textual evidence, together with archaeological remains of ritual activities.^[3][4] The sinologist David Keightley preferred to describe the tradition attested in these texts as "religiosity" rather than "religion", owing to the limited scope of what they reveal of Shang subjective experience.^[5]

Several constraints follow from the nature of this evidence. Shang inscriptions record matters whose divination mattered to the ruling elite, so that features they reveal cannot, in a straightforward way, be assigned either to a state religion or to lineage and personal practice.^[6] They contain no narrative or expository writing; therefore, spirits that they name are not associated with any stories, and the pattern of worship is left without a stated rationale. Interpretation, as such, depends on later traditions of uncertain application.^[7] Inscribed oracle bones also constituted only about one-tenth of the corpus excavated at the last Shang capital, with uninscribed ones for divination recovered from widely dispersed sites, indicating that the literate record represents only a narrow portion of religious practice.^[8][9]

Interpretations of Shang belief may also encounter limitations from traditional Chinese notions of cultural continuity. Because the Shang furnish the earliest written evidence from China, features of later Chinese religion are often sought in their inscriptions; the Shang state meanwhile was preceded and surrounded by cultures of comparable complexity, and elements of later tradition may descend from these rather than from the Shang.^[10]

Pantheon structure

The Shang articulated a pantheon filled with deities of various origins, particularly ancestral and natural.^[11] Following Keightley's classification, its members are commonly grouped into six categories of "Powers": pre-dynastic kings, dynastic kings, heir-producing royal consorts, the Former Lords, the nature powers, and the High God Di.^[12] The first three constitute the core royal lineage; the remainder stand in uncertain or no relation to it.^[13]

Despite featuring a wide and diverse range of deities, Shang religion was dominated by ancestor worship, with core tenets of belief centred on relationships between the living and the dead.^[14] Divisions between these categories are less sharp than they appear. The River and Mountain Powers are listed in series with Former Lords and pre-dynastic kings in single inscriptions, and are treated in worship in ways that parallel ancestral spirits, leading some scholars to propose that the Shang construed nature powers as remote forbears of the royal line.^[15][16] Nor were functions clearly divided, with control over natural phenomena attributed to Di, the nature powers, the Former Lords, the pre-dynastic kings and at least one dynastic king alike.^[17]

Whether Shang religion was bureaucratic, or at least proto-bureaucratic, is disputed. Keightley posited a bureaucratic stance, on grounds of the depersonalisation of the spirits, the rationalisation of the pantheon, and the routinisation of divination.^[18][19] Eno accepts that divination grew increasingly routinised and that the ancestral pantheon was ordered by strict seniority, but rejects the description of the pantheon itself as bureaucratic based on several observations  – no more than ten inscriptions depict Di commanding other spirits, and a hierarchy resting entirely on ascriptive traits of lineage, without division of function, is in his view dissimilar to a bureaucracy.^[20][21] Sarah Allan similarly declines the characterisation of the exchange between the king and his ancestors as contractual, at least for the earliest period.^[22]

Attributed powers

The Shang believed that Di exercised authority over both the natural and human worlds, which included controlling the climate, influencing the harvest, and overseeing the outcomes of battles.^[32][33] Di expressed approval or disapproval over the everyday actions of humans, and was thought to be capable of either providing aid or sending down disasters.^[33][34] Inscriptions record Di bringing an end to a city and determining whether the Shang would receive support in attacking an enemy people.^[35]

Di has commonly been understood as presiding over a hierarchy of spirits, including former humans and nature deities, all of whom were under Di's control, and as the only power able to issue commands (令; lìng).^[36][32][34] Both parts of this account have been scrutinised in light of existing inscriptional evidence. Eno finds an articulated command structure largely absent from the inscriptions, noting one text in which the River Power orders rain, and observes that where Di is said to order rain or thunder, what is commanded appears to be a natural phenomenon rather than a subordinate deity.^[37] John C. Didier identifies He, Huang Yin and Yi Yin as further spirits able to ling rain and secure good harvests, and notes that nature powers and Former Lords were petitioned for rain in the same terms as Di.^[38]

A small group of inscriptions refers to the "Five Adjutants" or "Five Ministers" (五臣; wǔchén) of Di, and one to "Di's envoy Wind".^[39][35] Didier interprets the former as subordinate spirits transmitting Di's messages to the human world, possibly associated with the five classical planets.^[39] Eno regards the evidence as too slight to establish a divine bureaucracy, the phrase being attested on only a handful of bone fragments, two of them in ambiguous contexts.^[40][41]

Absence of worship

While the Shang conducted rituals to ensure Di would not harm them, there is no evidence that they made sacrifices to Di as they did to other spirits, implying a significant distinction in how Di was perceived.^[42][24][b] Di is in this respect anomalous: alone among the spirits, Di appears to have needed and desired no sustenance.^[45]

Three explanations have been offered. The traditional view, associated with Hu Houxuan, holds that Di was too exalted to receive offerings directly, and that sacrifices reached Di through an ancestral intermediary acting as "helpmate" (配; pèi).^[46][44] Eno objects that the evidence for this practice derives from Zhou and later texts rather than from Shang inscriptions, and argues instead that di was a generic term and therefore an inappropriate way of naming the object of a sacrifice.^[47] Didier holds that Di received no cult because it was "a single and impersonal council of godliness" rather than a god possessing a single consciousness.^[44]

Identity

The identity of Di has been the subject of debate.^[48] Didier attributes the persistence of a singular, monotheistic reading in Western scholarship to two influences: the pyramidal hierarchy of deities that emerges in Chinese thought from about the 4th century BC, some six or seven centuries after the fall of the Shang; and the expectations of Christian missionaries from the 17th century onwards, who sought to identify Di with the God of the Bible.^[49]

As Emperor Ku

Some theories identify Di with the legendary Emperor Ku, the third of the Five Emperors mentioned as preceding the Shang in Sima Qian's Shiji (c. 91 BC). Emperor Ku could be the same as a Shang spirit whose ascribed name may read as Kui, addressed as "High Ancestor" in at least four Shang inscriptions.^[51][52] This might prove to be useful for the Shang king, who accordingly was seen as sharing portions of the High God's power, and would in effect universalise the ancestral worship of the royal Zi clan.^[53]

This identification is subject to various obstacles  – Di issues orders and sends down approval while Kui does not, and Kui receives cult while Di does not; Kui is also invoked in series with other powers in a way suggestive of a horizontal relationship rather than an apex.^[53] Keightley has objected more generally to any account making Di a composite of Shang ancestors, on the grounds that Di could act against the Shang, such as by ordering enemy attacks.^[54][55]

Mountain and river powers

Some nature powers were responsible for crop failures, which were detrimental to the Shang whose economy was based on agriculture.^[74] Such spirits include the Mountain Power Yue (岳) and the River Power He (河).^[75][76] He is generally interpreted as the Yellow River, and Yue as Mount Song, the principal peak of the central Henan region.^[77][75] Some scholars instead identify Yue as the spirit representing the Taihang Mountains to the west of the last Shang capital.^[78] Both are associated with the region of the Shang capitals prior to the move to Anyang, and there is a long-attested tradition that rulers were responsible for service to the major mountains and rivers of their territories.^[77]

Yue and He – which influenced state matters such as harvests and war – were the only nature spirits with clearly defined roles, and the Shang practice of treating them as ancestor-like deities was likely to allow them to exercise their authority together with ancestor spirits.^[79][16] The River Power alone among the nature powers is recorded as able to harm the king.^[80] A few inscriptions suggest that delegations were sent to make offerings to the River Power at the Yellow River itself.^[81] Whether either was regarded as an ancestor is disputed: an isolated inscription appears to name a "High Ancestor River", though this may be a fused reference to two separate powers.^[82]

Shang kings also worshipped the spirit of the Huan River, which served as a place where they conducted rituals.^[83][d] Oracle texts mention a certain 'Shang River' and its own river spirit, whose name may be the origin of the dynastic name itself.^[85]

The Earth Power

Recognised by the Shang, the Earth Power She (社) – or Tu (土) in Shang inscriptions – was associated with protection from misfortune, and potentially with the feminine.^[86][87] The identification is not secure, as in almost all occurrences the graph tu can be read without reference to a deity, as denoting territory or the outdoor sacrificial altar (she), and the one inscription that appears to treat it as a power in parallel with He and Yue may instead name the Former Lord Xiangtu (相土).^[88]

Wind gods and the four directions

Among the nature spirits were wind gods, which were associated with the four cardinal directions and the four seasons.^[89][90] Winds also seemed to be associated with the phoenix, which is mentioned as Di's messenger – an association reflected in the oracle bone graph for 'wind' (風; fēng), a pictograph of a bird that has been identified with the phoenix (鳳; fèng).^[91] Rituals were conducted to appease the wind gods, and to pray for successful harvests. The wind itself appears as a deity, and there are other spirits that could control winds.^[92][93]

Inscriptions in the Jiaguwen Heji name each direction together with its wind, in the formula "perform a di-sacrifice to the South, called Wei, its wind called Yi, requesting crops".^[94] The names given are:^[89]

The two inscriptions carrying these names are not identical: Heji 14294 assigns the name Wei to the wind rather than to the direction, and reverses the pair in the case of the West, a variation not expected among fixed members of a pantheon. Matsumaru Michio has further identified 14294 as a practice or training inscription rather than the record of an actual divination, which Eno takes to indicate that the directional and wind names were basic enough to Shang culture to appear in elementary primers.^[95]

The same names recur in literature composed a millennium later, under different characters.^[96] Following Chen Mengjia, Allan aligns the Shang directional names with those of the four peoples named in the Yao dian chapter of the Book of Documents and with the four directions of the Da huang jing section of the Shanhaijing, holding that the three sets correspond even where the graphs differ, since several can be equated phonologically or semantically.^[97] The Da huang jing additionally names the east wind Jun (俊; Jùn), which Allan connects to the high ancestor Di Jun and so to the sun mythology.^[97]

That the four directions are given names strongly suggests that they were delineated members of the pantheon.^[96] Their significance within Shang religion itself is less clear: apart from the inscriptions that name them, the directional powers are almost never invoked in a sacrificial context – Eno finds only one clear instance, a sacrifice to the Power of the East – and in many other occurrences the directions can be read locatively rather than as deities.^[98]

Celestial spirits

Some inscriptions refer to gendered spirits such as the Mother of the West (西母; Xīmǔ) and Mother of the East (東母; Dōngmǔ) who respectively controlled sunset and sunrise.^[99][100] Some identify the two spirits as goddesses of celestial objects, while others say that they were more likely earth deities with possible origins from agricultural and fertility cults.^[101][100] A third proposal identifies them as antecedents of Xihe and Changxi, the consorts of Di Jun in later mythology and mothers respectively of the ten suns and the twelve moons; Eno regards the evidence for this as highly leveraged.^[102][103] Shang inscriptions seem to indicate the worship of a third spirit, the Central Mother (中母; Zhōngmǔ), even though some interpret it to be ancestral.^[104]

Night and dreams were possibly associated with an owl deity, with references to owls found in Shang inscriptions and art.^[105] Dance and sacrifices acted as Shang prayers to the rains.^[106][107] Similarly, worship of the Moon is existent but rarely seen in Shang texts.^[108][109]

Whether the Sun was itself a deity is disputed. Keightley identified a cult of the Sun at the core of Shang religion, to which the Shang prayed for harvests although it did not usually receive rituals.^[110][111] Eno counts at most about ten relevant inscriptions, all of which may equally be read as recording a rite performed at sunrise and sunset rather than one offered to the sun, and concludes that judgment should be reserved.^[112] Keightley proposed to enlarge the evidence by reading the cyclical sign ding (丁), in certain contexts, as a short form of ri (日; 'sun'), although Eno regards this as requiring further investigation.^[113]

Ancestresses

The Shang worshipped female ancestors alongside male ones, though on a markedly smaller scale; ancestresses were the focus of only about one-sixth of Shang rituals, and their jurisdiction appears to have been seen as limited to reproduction.^[135] Unlike the predynastic kings, neither royal consorts nor dynastic kings are recorded as influencing weather or crops.^[130]

Which consorts received cult was governed by a criterion that remains disputed. Eno holds that the ancestresses worshipped were only those who bore a son who ultimately took the throne, so that several consorts of a single king could be included where each had borne a reigning brother.^[130] Chang Yuzhi argues instead that the determining factor was not the bearing of an heir but establishment as principal consort (正后; zhènghòu).^[136] The wives of the first four predynastic ancestors were excluded in any case,^[137] and the regularised sacrificial cycle of the later reigns excluded both predynastic consorts and the mothers of kings outside the main line; the form of sacrifice assigned to ancestresses also differed from that of ancestors.^[138]

Ancestresses were nonetheless credited with real power over the living. Shang texts mention female ancestors causing the king's illness, and occasionally refer to angry and unfriendly ancestresses who would thereafter receive offerings.^[139][140] In divinations asking which spirit was striking the king with sickness, only three agents are ever named: Di, "those below and above" (下上; xiàshàng), and "the many consorts" (多妣; duōbǐ).^[139]

Women attested in the inscriptions include Mu Ji (母己), Bi Bing (妣丙), and most prominently Fu Hao, the consort of Wu Ding, who was referred to as Mu Xin (母辛) and Bi Xin (妣辛) after her death – the shift from mu (母) to bi (妣) marking her recession from the generation of the reigning king's mother into that of his grandmother.^{[141][142][143]}

Wang Hai and Nao

Two members of the group are referred to in the inscriptions as 'High Ancestors' (高祖; gāozǔ).^[144] The first is written with a graph variously transcribed as Nao (獶), Kui (夔) or Jun (夋), and is widely identified with the figure the Shiji names as a source of the Shang lineage, Ku.^{[145][146][k]}

The second is Wang Hai (王亥), plausibly identified with the figure the Shiji names as the father of Shang Jia.^[149] His name is the only one among the Shang ancestors to incorporate a character from the cycle of twelve (the Earthly Branches) rather than the cycle of ten (the Heavenly Stems), and his position is pivotal between the remote ancestors and those named by stem.^[150][151] In a minority of inscriptions a bird is drawn over the cyclical character hai.^[151][152]

The powers of these two outranked those of the highest Shang ancestors, ranging from affecting the weather to influencing the king, although they are invoked far less frequently.^[153][154]

Other figures

Also mentioned as Former Lords were Ji (季) and Wang Gen (王亙).^[108] The category also comprised spirits whom modern scholars identify as former Shang ministers with the postmortem ability to curse the living, such as Xue Wu, Xian Wu, Huang Yin, and Yi Yin;^[155][156] the latter was accompanied by a consort named Yi Shi, and was able to control rain and ensure good harvests.^[157][158] A position from Qiu Xigui takes Huang Yin and Yi Yin to be identical spirits.^[159]

Yi Yin is of particular interest because later Chinese accounts describe him either a commoner of exceptional ability or a defecting minister of the Xia dynasty, with no affinal link to the Shang royal house; yet his sacrifices fall consistently on the ding day, indicating a cyclical stem designation not reflected in his name, and his consort was worshipped as a power in her own right.^[160] Some scholars have accordingly argued that he was a member of a royal sub-lineage or the founder of a collateral branch, though the evidence is not compelling enough to displace the simpler interpretation that his place reflects services rendered to the state.^[161]

Also in the Shang pantheon was E (娥), who is not clearly assigned to any category, and Mo Xi, who in later literature was mentioned as a consort of the last Xia ruler Jie.^[162][163]

Political legitimation

Because the Former Lords stand partly outside the royal lineage, their role has been read as bearing on the legitimacy of Shang rule. Itô Michiharu suggested that they were independent deities worshipped by local cultures absorbed by the Shang in the course of state formation, whose worship the Shang assumed as a means of enhancing the legitimacy of their conquests; on this view, adopting widely revered gods as royal ancestors amounted to a claim to divine kingship.^[164] An alternative reading treats their adoption as a response to the belief, attested in later texts, that spirits do not accept sacrifices from people outside their own lineages.^[164]

The celestial pole

Based on Shang inscriptional evidence, some scholars point to the possibility of Di having a cosmological identity.^[167] On this interpretation the Shang believed in the divinity of the north celestial pole, and it was at the pole's surrounding square area that the High God was thought to dwell.^[168][169] David Pankenier and Didier arrived at this proposal independently and agree on its general form, but differ on its details.^[170]

The polar square in Shang and Zhou graphs

The Shang graph di (禘), whose rectangle Didier projects onto the stars Mizar, Thuban, Kochab, Alioth and Pherkad

The Zhou graph for Tian (天), which also carries a rectangle at the top

Pankenier observes that the true celestial pole lies in a region empty of significant stars, and projects the graph di onto the polar sky of the mid-to-late 2nd millennium BC such that its extreme points correspond to visible stars while its axes intersect at the vacant pole; he associates this with the later supreme power Taiyi.^[171][172] Didier welcomes Pankenier's support for a pole-centred godhead but rejects his particular projection, arguing that it does not account for the quadrilateral ding (口) element present in the graphs for Di and for several ancestral names, that the projected strokes do not follow lines of stars, and that it cannot accommodate the Zhou graph for Tian, which must derive from the same stars if the Zhou equated Tian with Di.^[170] He further disputes Pankenier's premise that the Shang abandoned the older pole star Thuban for Kochab around 1545 BC, noting that the two were then approximately equidistant from the true pole and that the weight of tradition lay with Thuban.^[173][l]

Di was perceived by Didier to be composed of two components, with the upper one called Shangdi and its lower counterpart named Xiadi.^[175] Either of these two was probably a collective manifestation of Shang ancestors, and Didier identifies it to be Shangdi, which he believes to have been the part of Di associated with the polar square.^[176]

The square-like component within the character for Di possibly denoted the sifang itself.^[177] The square also appears as an independent character in Shang inscriptions (口), representing the fourth Heavenly Stem ding and signifying various ritual meanings.^[178][m] Posthumous names of some kings might be related to Shang cosmology, especially names with stems jia, ding and yi, which were probably projections of the celestial square.^[180]

Dualism and complementarity

A large majority of divination topics in the reign of Wu Ding were put to oracle bones as complementary pairs: a positive and a negative charge, opposed in content and placed antipodally on either side of the plastron, their inscriptions balanced as near mirror images and their pyromantic cracks deliberately symmetrical, the symmetry having been fixed in advance by the corresponding placement of the hollows chiselled into the reverse.^[181] Divinations concerning sickness, childbearing, rain, harvest, curses by ancestors or nature powers, military strategy, construction and tribute were all, on occasion, bifurcated in this way.^[182]

Keightley read the practice as evidence of a distinctive metaphysics. The Shang diviners, he argued, saw the world as "a series of balanced dualisms" in which auspicious and inauspicious outcomes – harvest and dearth, victory and defeat, flood and drought – were inextricably intertwined possibilities; the paired charges dramatised not a battle of good against evil but the symbiosis of good and bad fortune.^[182] Because both charges were potentially true they were contrary without being contradictory, and only by giving each possibility a fair hearing could a divination be equitable, in accord with reality, and therefore valid.^[183] A practical corollary followed: because the undesirable outcome had been acknowledged in advance and incised on the shell, a royal forecast that failed was not a fatal challenge to the king's standing as diviner.^[183]

The balance was, per Keightley, transitory. A divination might show it inclining one way while the opposite possibility recorded on the other half of the shell stood as a reminder of the changeable nature of reality and of the modest human role in understanding or controlling it.^[184] Shang divination was accordingly "no part of a theology of optimism", but neither did it assume a theology of tragedy; it conceived instead of "a world of alternating modes, pessimistic at times, optimistic at others, but with the germs of one mode always inherent in the other", which Keightley characterised – at least for the Wu Ding-period inscriptions – as "a metaphysics of yin and yang".^[185]

The principle was not confined to divination, as binary and symmetrical pairing is characteristic of much Shang ritual art.^[186][187] Keightley distinguished his reading from Lévi-Strauss's account of the union of opposites in myth, holding that the oppositions of the Shang diviner – rain or no rain, curse or no curse, harvest received or not received – are more starkly antinomical than those Lévi-Strauss adduced and by their nature permit no union, and that the complementarity of the charge pairs was explicit and intentional rather than unconscious, representing "not myth but dialectics".^[188]

The ten suns

Sarah Allan contends that the Shang possessed a myth of ten suns and that the royal ancestors were organised in a totemic relationship to them, the suns in turn being identified with birds.^[196] She reconstructs the myth from the "Mulberry Tree tradition" of Zhou and Han texts, chiefly the Shanhaijing, Huainanzi and Chuci, in which ten suns rise in turn from the fusang (扶桑) tree, bathe in a pool in the Valley of the Sun, and are borne by birds, with Xihe as their mother.^[197] The better-known myth in which Archer Yi shoots nine of the ten suns presupposes these motifs and, Allan argues, served to reconcile the tradition with the Zhou belief in a single sun by relegating the ten to a mythical past.^[198]

Allan links this tradition to the Shang through their origin myth, in which the ancestor Xie is born after Jiandi swallows the egg of a Xuanniao sent by Emperor Ku, whose equivalence with Di Jun means that the bird giving birth to the Shang is the same as the bird in the suns.^[199] She adduces further associations between the Shang and the mulberry: the sanglin (桑林) altar of the successor state of Song, the drought at the Shang's founding at which Tang offered himself as a sacrifice, and the birth of Yi Yin from the Hollow Mulberry.^[200]

From the inscriptions themselves she cites the graphs for 'east' (東) and 'west' (西), read as a sun within a tree and as the nest in which the sun-birds roost; the female Mothers of the West and East as antecedents of Changxi and Xihe; a bronze dedication to a "Black Bird Lady"; and the bird drawn over Wang Hai's name.^[201] On this basis she proposes that the identification of each ancestor with one of the ten suns underlies the Shang ritual calendar, in which ancestors bearing one of the ten Heavenly Stems received sacrifice on the corresponding day, and notes that the stems are termed the 'ten suns' (十日; shí rì) in Zhou and Han texts.^[202] Although Shang inscriptions do not directly mention the ten suns, Allan suggests that this totemic tradition was implied by many later texts.^[203]