The evidence is presented thematically, not chronologically, because I focus on relatively stable, long-standing ritual practices for which evidence is scattered, rather than on a hypothetical historical development. Based on diverse material, such as local gazetteers, newspapers, inscriptions, prosimetric performance texts ( baojuan), and literati’s anthologies, I will explore the various contexts of his cult and his diverse ritual roles a large part of the material concerns Jiangnan, but I will also refer to other regions, notably the north China plain and Hunan. The following sections focus in more detail on the late imperial period, with particular attention to Lord Wang’s role among the elite. In a first section I will briefly summarize what is known about the early phases of Lord Wang’s history, since this is better documented in current scholarship. My strategy is to gather evidence of Lord Wang’s interventions among humans in late imperial times in as many contexts and genres as possible and to try to find coherence among them this leads me to focus on the modes and techniques as well as purposes for creating his presence. The object of the present case study, whom I call Lord Wang, is known by various titles, the most common being Divine official, Wang lingguan 王靈官, and Heavenly Lord, Wang tianjun 王天君, 7 god of the fiery chariot 火車, chief general of Former Heaven 先天主將, and Heart general, xinjiang 心將. There are several Chinese emic categories for ritual, but the one that is relevant to making gods such as Lord Wang present is fa 法. By ritual here, I mean codified techniques, performed by a person who has completed a socially recognized initiation into these techniques, that allow for human interactions with non-humans in ways that are controlled and beneficial. 5 Barend ter Haar has suggested in his study of Guandi that the god is the sum total of stories told about him or her 6 this is a fruitful avenue of enquiry but I would suggest that equally important is the sum of sensory experiences of people who have felt the presence of the god through a medium, on stage, in spirit-writing, dreams, visions, and other ways, which are all ritually produced. ![]() 4 Furthermore, I propose that, at least in some cases, a key mechanism for creating a divine persona is the ritual techniques used by religious specialists to make the god present. This is what I mean by “divine persona,” a notion related to but distinct from the Latourian notion of non-human actant. Divine identities evolve and complexify but can hardly change entirely: whatever a god does (or is made to do) needs to be coherent with what she or he had done before. ![]() My argument relies on the idea that a god can certainly be appropriated by various persons and groups, but that, in order to have any use, it needs to remain coherent. 3 My story is, however, somewhat different, as it is largely focused on how late imperial elites appropriated the cult while maintaining a direct continuity with early modern rituals. 2 This essay thus echoes earlier studies of gods with roots in Daoist exorcistic traditions that later developed into multifarious directions, such as Zhenwu 眞武 or Guandi 關帝 (Guan Yu 關羽). More specifically, I hope to show how certain modern cults, such as Lord Wang’s, were to an important extent shaped by the daofa 道法, the new exorcistic ritual traditions that emerged during the early modern period (tenth to fourteenth centuries) and have since remained central to Daoism. 1 This essay proposes to take a different approach: it explores, through the case study of Lord Wang, how a god could be present throughout late imperial (fifteenth to early twentieth centuries) and modern Chinese society, from the village processions to the monasteries to the clubs of the elites, in a thoroughly coherent guise and it argues that this divine persona was clearly defined by Daoist priests and their ritual practices. ![]() ![]() Both approaches, however, often emphasize the god’s different representations (including iconography, myths, and rituals) among different social classes or local contexts, and argue that the coherent discourse held about them by religious professionals, especially Daoists and Buddhists, has a relatively limited impact on the practices and imaginary of ordinary people. Obviously, they are not exclusive, but they are rarely given equal attention. The first is what we may call history of divine identity, that is, following the evolutions of a given god in narratives (notably hagiography, novels, and baojuan 寶卷 ) and iconography the second is the history of the god’s cult, focusing on social contexts and patronage. Recent research on Chinese gods tends to align with either one of two main approaches.
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