Tag Archives: moon goddess

Hou Yi and Chang’e Legend

Context: The informant is a 21 year old USC student and the daughter of two Taiwanese immigrants. She told me that she was definitely missing some details, but this is the story she learned growing up about the origins of the Mid-Autumn festival. The following are her exact words.

“So, there’s a couple, right, and the guy has like superhero strength – warrior vibes. At the time, there were 10 suns in the sky, and they were so hot that they were burning everything up, so he shot 9 of them out of the sky, leaving only one behind. As a reward, some higher power gave him this magic potion to make him stronger, but in the middle of the night, the day before he was meant to take it, his enemy poisoned it. For some reason, he still wanted to take it, so before he could, his wife drank the whole thing to save him. She ended up floating up into the moon, and so during the Mid-Autumn festival, because the moon is full, people say you can still see her silhouette up there.”

After doing some research, I found out that this is known as the story of Hou Yi and Chang’e, an immortal archer and his wife, the moon goddess before the latter becomes the moon goddess; this seems as if it would count as a mythic narrative. Not only is this the origin story of the sun, but it’s also the origin of the designs present on the moon. There’s a pretty common history of humans seeing faces where there are none (tree trunks) and looking at the moon would reasonably yield the same result. It’s not a story that anyone thinks could have happened, but also not a story that one would disagree with, considering the nature of it. Interestingly, there’s multiple different versions of this story online, including ones where Hou Yi goes mad with power rather than having his elixir poisoned and instead Chang’e must protect others by acting against him. It would be interesting to see if these differences revealed anything about typical historical conflicts that a certain region might have faced or a regional variation in values that might have caused this oicotypical difference.

The Myth of the Jade Rabbit

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: March 26, 2023
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Text: “One day the goddess of the moon, Chang-e, needed help preparing the elixir of life. She knew that humans were too selfish for the task, so she decided to look among the animals. When she arrived, she asked all of the animals to bring her sacrifices, like vegetables and handmade gifts. All the animals offered her gifts, and she collected them, but when she got to the rabbit, the rabbit confessed that she hadn’t been able to find a gift. The rabbit felt terrible, so she jumped into a fire and sacrificed herself, becoming a roasted rabbit for Chang-e to eat. The goddess was so impressed with the rabbit’s bravery and sacrifice that she resurrected the rabbit and brought her to the moon to help her make the elixir. And today, if you look closely enough, you can see the image of the rabbit on the moon.”

Context: The informant is a 19-year old Chinese-American student who heard this at her local Chinese Christian church in Orange County when she was around 8 years old. She admittedly had some concerns about the accuracy of the story but told it how she remembered it. 

Analysis: Despite the story’s explicit condemnation of humanity, an interesting tension arises in how the animals in the story are still indirectly anthropomorphized as they display the ability to understand language and comprehend success/failure on an intellectual level. There seems to be an inherent contradiction embedded in the fact that a human is not able to carry out this task but an animal, who is humanlike in every other sense, gets chosen instead. To explore this further, the central focus of the myth seems to be selflessness and the search for the ideal selfless being. Pure selflessness seems only to be attained by creatures and beings that are simultaneously like and unalike us, such as Jesus Christ, the quintessential Christian sacrifice who was both human and God, or an anthropomorphic rabbit, a non-human animal that exhibits humanlike traits. The rabbit also seems to be a sort of Messiah figure who lays down her life and ascends to heaven to dedicate her life towards serving humanity. Perhaps the story suggests that as humans, we recognize and strive towards goodness/selflessness within ourselves, but at the same time acknowledge that this ideal is unattainable for us as imperfect beings. This fundamental tension embodies the paradigmatic approach to the myth pioneered by Claude Levi-Strauss, who explains how dichotomies inherent in myth are reflective of larger social and cultural paradigms. I believe the tension demonstrated here is the fundamental tension between mortality and the soul: our spiritual capacity for good but our mortal folly that prevents us from always acting on it. Only very special messianic figures, like Jesus and the rabbit, who are simultaneously both human and not, are able to act with this degree of selflessness and bridge the gap between mortality and the divine by performing the ultimate sacrifice. The difference between humans and the messiah is that humans are composed of both body and spirit, only part divine, whereas the messiah is both fully human and divine simultaneously, which is a great paradox beyond our ability to comprehend. Perhaps, this was why humans were not chosen in the story, because such a selfless task requires a being ontologically separate from (but still related to) humanity all together: a creature that physically embodies this Straussian dualism where mortality and divinity simultaneously inhabit the same being. Nonetheless, the connections to contemporary Christianity seem striking, and perhaps these messianic themes have more polygenetic roots than initially thought. This could also serve as a reflection on Christianity’s influence in China and an attempt for the Chinese people to reclaim their own form of cultural agency in the messianic narrative. 

 

Chang’e: The Moon Goddess

Context:

Y is my other parental figure of mine who grew up in China and is currently living in California. 

This conversation took place over a weekly phone call with my parents after I asked them about stories that they knew from China. 

Text: 

Y: Chang’e is the one we see the shadow in the moon, and the shadow looks like a lady there.

Me: Oh yeah.

Y: But the story goes that there’s a beautiful woman who’s married to a famous archer, and his name is Hou Yi. The guy is the one who, when in Ancient Times, they had 10 suns. The sun in the sky, not the kids. The sun in the sky, when there was 10 of them, the sky was so hot that the earth, the crops couldn’t grow because of the squelching from the sun, and the soil is cracked and everyone was dying from the heat. So Hou Yi, the husband, because he’s a famous archer, he decided to shoot the nine suns down and just leave one of them left.

Me: Uhuh.

Y: So he pulled his legendary, he had this bow that was a legendary sun and succeeded in shooting down nine of the suns. So the earth was back to normal.

Because of what he did, he met the like, goddess, the goddess decided to reward him with some kind of medicine that will make him live forever. The goddess name is… the jade- no, the Wángmǔ Niángniáng, yeah. Hou Yi felt very, unsure about whether he should take the elixir or the medicine because he didn’t want to live forever after his wife dies. Wife is mortal so if he becomes immortal he’s going to be living alone without his wife. So he just put the medicine underneath the bed or in a closet, wherever, but the wife found out about it and she decided to steal it. And after the husband fell asleep, she took the medicine and drank the medicine, all of it. And after, she felt her body get light and she started to float in the air. Then the husband woke up and saw the wife floating away. He saw her floating away and tried to grab onto her but couldn’t because she was already in the sky. He tried to call her to stop but she couldn’t really stop it. When she saw the moon, she tried to land on the moon and she stayed there forever. Because she couldn’t move after and the husband really missed her so he put out her favorite food, dessert like the mooncake, out every night to hope she will see it and return. But she couldn’t return.

After that, on the moon festival, everyone would eat moon cakes and look at the moon where Chang’e lives. And the moon shadow suggests there’s a rabbit called the jade rabbit to keep her company on the moon. So poor Hou Yi put out the food until he died, basically, but she couldn’t return. She became immortal but he was mortal so he died, eventually. 

Reflection:

This is another story that I was told when I was a kid. I remember distinctly looking up at the moon and imagining the lady on the moon and her rabbit. This origin story is interesting because Chang’e is seen as the moon goddess yet the reason why she is up on the moon is for selfish reasons. Additionally, this plays into the traditional view of the moon as a feminine symbol while the sun is a masculine symbol. While the sun is not her husband, her husband was the one who shot down the other suns in order to restore peace to Earth. I think it is also interesting how the tale affects the food that we consume during the festival as the egg yolks in the mooncakes are meant to represent the moon in the sky. Some versions of the story also explain her reasoning for taking the medicine because they portray her as someone who previously worked in heaven in the Jade Emperor’s palace before she was sentenced to earth for breaking a vase. 


“The Legend of Chang E.” The Legend of Chang E, http://www.moonfestival.org/the-legend-of-chang-e.html.

Don’t Point at the Moon

Nationality: Taiwanese
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin

The interviewer’s initials are denoted through the initials BD, while the informant’s responses are marked as MW.

MW: My mom told me not to point at the moon. I don’t know why, but she said that if you point at the moon with your hand, your ear will get cut off.

BD:Where did your mom get this belief?

MW: Her mom told her, like my grandma.

BD: Your mom’s from Taiwan, right?

MW: But my grandma is from China.

BD: Is this belief common? Like, do other people believe in it?

MW: I think it’s common, in Taiwan.

 

Analysis:
Upon researching this piece of folklore further, I found that there is a story that accompanies this belief. The goddess of the moon is angered when she is pointed at, because that is disrespectful to her. As a punishment, she will cut off the pointer’s ear in their sleep. A Taiwanese publication includes this belief in list of some more surprising superstitions: http://focustaiwan.tw/news/afav/201603200005.aspx.

Chinese Moon Goddess

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 26, 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin

The interviewer’s initials are denoted through the initials BD, while the informant’s responses are marked as JL.

BD: So tell me about this legend.

JL: Okay, so there’s a legend about this woman who lives in the moon. She is the goddess of the moon, and what happened is there was this guy, a warrior—I guess the equivalent would be like Apollo, because he’s an archer. And he shoots down the suns. There’s like ten suns, back then, eons ago. And he shoots down nine of them because having ten was just way too much. The earth was just way too hot, and the people couldn’t do anything like grow crops and stuff because it was just too hot. So this guy comes along and shoots down nine of the suns—he has to keep one, otherwise there would be no daytime, but it’s a perfect balance where it’s not too hot. Because of his feat, he was granted a potion of immortality, but he didn’t drink it. He was a sweet guy, and didn’t want to leave his wife behind. He didn’t want to watch her grow old while he was immortal forever. So he stored it in his house. But then his apprentice broke into his house and tried to steal the potion, and the warrior’s wife instead drinks it herself. I guess, so it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands—his apprentice was not a cool dude. So her spirit went to the moon and she lives there immortal forever.

BD: Why the moon?

JL: I have no idea.

BD: Do most people know this story?

JL: Yes, it’s one of the better known myths in China. Like how everyone know the Greek gods, the moon lady is one of the better known stories.

 

Analysis:
There are many variations of this legend, likely in part because of how common it is in Chinese folklore. This is not the first time I’ve heard of the moon goddess, but this is the first time I have heard of her origins. Another version of this legend can be found at: http://www.moonfestival.org/the-legend-of-chang-e.html. The moon goddess is named as Chang’e. This legend is very interesting, because from it stems a lot of folklore regarding the moon. Superstitions such as pointing at the moon will cause the moon goddess to cut off your ear are related to this legend. A lot of Chinese cultural values also present themselves in this legend. The importance of family, and not leaving anyone behind is a very apparent one. Another is the importance of sacrificing for your family, which the goddess does—she does not want to live without her husband either, but she must in order to prevent his apprentice from obtaining the potion.