Chang'e (deity)

Symbols: Moon; elixir of life

Culture: Chinese

Chang’e is the moon goddess in Chinese mythology who represents agricultural prosperity, romance, and grace. The Chinese worship her every year at the Mid-Autumn Festival, a harvest festival at which offerings are made for health and wealth. In mythology, she is the wife of Yi, the Archer, also known as Hou Yi. Yi was a principal servant of the primary deity in the Taoist tradition, the god known as the Jade Emperor.

Taoism very likely emerged on the scene before the worship rituals that were associated with the goddess. Even her origin myths probably came later. But in China in earlier times, there had always been stories of a moon goddess; this goddess tended to be venerated in a less organized way than Chang’e was.

The evolution of Chinese mythology throughout the ancient period (from the advent of written records to the beginning of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE) had an effect on the culture’s animistic or primitive worship rituals. These rituals were transformed by the successive waves of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism that swept through the region between the Shang Dynasty in the sixteenth century BCE and the Ming Dynasty, which lasted until the seventeenth century CE.

In Mythology

The central myth of Chang’e is the tale of how she came to live permanently on the moon. Chang’e was known to be a skillful and emotive dancer in the court of the Jade Emperor, and her husband was an archer for this ruler. The Jade Emperor’s ten sons, who were in the form of suns, had all risen together, damaging crops and burning the people of the earthly realm. The Jade Emperor asked Yi to kill his sons, so Yi descended to the earthly realm and shot down all but one. Outraged at what the archer had done—he had become angry despite the fact that Yi had acted on his orders— the Jade Emperor stopped Yi from destroying the surviving sun, and he banished Yi to the earthly realm to live as a mortal. Chang’e was suffered the same punishment as Yi’s wife.

Having appealed to the Jade Emperor for sympathy, Yi was given a vial of an immortality elixir, and if he and his wife both shared it, each one drinking half, they would live forever on the earthly plane. But to drink all of the elixir would raise one to the spirit world, and one would live there forever instead. In the many versions of the story that explain what Chang’e did next, the outcome is always the same. She drinks the entire contents of the vial. In most accounts, the elixir is delivered to the home of Yi and Chang’e while Yi is away. In one version of the tale, Yi’s apprentice, Feng Meng, then attempts to steal the elixir for himself, so Chang’e consumes all of it, presumably to prevent the theft. In another version, she is simply curious and consumes all of the elixir before Yi is able to instruct her on its dangers. Doomed, she ascends from the earth to the moon, and she is fated to remain there for all eternity. Yi, heartbroken, is forced to continue his mortal life on Earth. Devoted to Chang’e, he regularly offers prayers and her favorite cakes, presumably to the Jade Emperor. In one version of the story, the Jade Emperor, as an act of kindness to relieve Yi’s suffering, permits the archer to visit his wife periodically.

Chang’e has a companion, the Jade Rabbit. The Jade Rabbit is equipped with a mortar and pestle, and the animal is fated to use them throughout eternity in order to prepare an immortality elixir. Along with the Jade Rabbit and Chang’e, a tortured soul named Wu Gang lives on the moon too. It is his fate to have to spend all eternity cutting down a cassia tree only to see it grow back.

Origins and Cults

The myth of Chang’e and her husband Yi is linked to the legend of the Jade Emperor. The Jade Emperor is the chief deity in the Taoist tradition, although he did not create the universe. Most stories say that he was an ancient king who became a deity after his death, a story that captures the Chinese Buddhist idea that a man, through his efforts to cultivate his higher self, can raise himself up, becoming something more than a man.

There are versions of the Chang’e myth in which the Jade Emperor does not appear, suggesting that the version of the myth that survives derives instead from a pre-Taoist moon goddess story.

Chang’e is venerated every year at the Mid-Autumn Festival, a harvest festival annually held in late September to early October. Because the moon is seen as an elemental force for rejuvenation and prosperity, making it the focus of the festival’s worship rituals and practices, Chang’e plays a major role in this celebration. Festivalgoers burn incense in her honor and pray for her blessing, hoping that she will grant them prosperity. Young women who are seeking romantic fulfillment also pray to Chang’e.

In Popular Culture

In the twenty-first century, Chang’e lives vividly in the popular imagination. For some, she is the dominant mythological personality in Chinese mythology, a fictional figure associated with the moon, and for others, she represents something more real than just an important deity in some ancient stories.

In the sixteenth century novel Journey to the West, one of the great works in Chinese literature that brought together the traditions of Chinese folk religion, Taoism, and Buddhism, Chang’e plays a token role. A supporting character, Zhu Bajie, is banished from the heavenly realm for flirting with Chang’e at a divine celebration.

She is the subject of and appears in several modern works of fiction, including novels, films, and video games. Perhaps most notably, she was invoked in a poem entitled "The Gods," which was written by Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China. The poem is a requiem for his wife, who was executed in 1933 by the Republic of China during the revolution that Mao led.

Just as the United States named its lunar program after the Greek god Apollo, the Chinese have turned to their own mythological tradition when naming their lunar program. A vehicle bearing the name of Chang’e was roaming the surface of the moon as late as early 2016. And during the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, ground control jokingly told the astronauts that a lonely woman from Chinese stories was present on the surface of the moon with them.

Bibliography

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Birrell, Anne. Chinese Mythology: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Print.

Bodde, Derk. "Myths of Ancient China." Ed. Samuel Noah Kramer. Mythologies of the Ancient World. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1961. Print.

Roberts, Jeremy. Chinese Mythology A to Z. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. Print.

Roy, Christian. Traditional Festivals: A Multicultural Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Print.

Yang, Lihui, Deming An, Jessica Anderson Turner, eds. Handbook of Chinese Mythology. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.