From folklore to literate theater: unpacking 'Madame White Snake'
Whalen Lai
Asian Folklore Studies
Vol.51 No.1 (April 1992)
pp.51-66
COPYRIGHT Asian Folklore Studies (Japan) 1992
THE Story of Madame White Snake (Baishe zhuan) is one of the
best-known stories in China, and, as a beautiful if chilling ghost
story, it has even been passed on to Japan. There have already been
several monograph-length studies on it (Hsu 1973; Wu 1969; Yen
1970). Of these, Hsu has painstakingly traced the development of the
tale, from a local, Ur-myth found in a Song collection all the way
to the popular-theater version of it. The latter is frequently
referred to as the drama of "The Flooding of the Golden Mountain."
Hsu includes in his coverage its Japanese fate and even the PRC
idealization of the serpent-turned-woman into a revolutionary
feminist (Hsu 1973).
The present essay will not try to cover the same ground. Instead it
will unpack this "man-demon romance" and look at how, in broad
historical outlines, China dealt with such intercourse between the
human and the supernatural in the form of myth, or folklore, or
popular theater. By using this one example, we hope to document
certain epochal changes in Chinese sensitivity toward the
otherworld. The philosophical postscript may be somewhat
unscientific. Those who hold generalizations suspect can ignore it.
THE SKELETON OF AN UR-MYTH
Before Madame White Snake changed from being a villain to being a
heroine, the local legend of her story was about the seduction of a
young man by a she-demon. The bare bones of the story are as
follows:
A young man encountered a beautiful maiden attended by a maid
during a festive outing near a lake.
He followed her and was invited to her fine mansion outside the
city, where he dined and stayed overnight.
After that one-night stand, the young man became visibly
emasculated,
his vital essence being slowly drained.
The suspicion that he had been bewitched was confirmed by a
revisit to the mansion-in reality, a graveyard.
A Taoist was called in to perform an exorcism, and, sure enough,
a white snake and an otter were driven out. Upon this skeleton,
though, other elements were soon added to give it flesh and
substance.
In one later version, the she-demon was so powerful that the Taoist
priest was easily routed. A Buddhist monk, deemed more charismatic,
was called in. Even that was not enough to subdue the demon, so, in
still more embellished versions, Bodhisattva Guanyin
(Avalokitesvara, Kannon) was summoned. The dramatic end has the
snake kept forever under the weight of a pagoda built on the isle in
the lake. The Taoist is a magician of this world; the Buddhist monk,
being celibate, represents a higher calling; and the pagoda, being
what houses the Buddha relic (sarira), is the Buddha-body
(Buddha-kaya) incarnate. Other elements of the Ur-myth were also
changed. Nowadays we do not even remember the role of the otter. It
has been replaced by a tiny green snake that, in her human form,
plays handmaid to her mistress, Madame White. Nicknamed Xiao Qing,
or "Little Green," she now functions as the matchmaker to the
central couple.
The most dramatic change comes, however, over Madame White Snake.
Though unable to shed totally her demonic persona, Madame White rose
from being a heartless beast to being an ideal mate. She was a
loving wife, a caring mother, a rescuer of her family from the first
flood, and, at that point, a general benefactor of men. She took on
the virtues of the traditional Chinese female, especially
forbearance, a virtue born of necessity when women had little say in
a man's society. That was brought out more so by the fact that
Madame White was being hounded by her enemies, the ghostbusters of
yore, who simply would not let her be.
However, if forbearance was the virtue of submissive womanhood,
Madame White, being no common woman, would show an independence of
will that would endear her to the feminist. Indeed, in the glare of
her indomitable will, her mate appears all too spineless a male.
Indecisive and moved this way or that by the tides of changing
circumstance, he was the forgettable character who never rose above
his situation. At first, he was visibly seduced by her beauty. Then
he did much of her bidding when she saved the family from the first
flood. He was the passive one. When the tide turns against the
she-demon, the man seems to forget the love and children they
shared, as he does the bidding of her enemies. It is true that they
saved him from her, but during the humanizing rewrite of her
character, it was never suggested that she wished her family any
harm. Theoretically, the couple could have "lived happily ever
after," had not her enemies forced her hand. The modern feminist
would even see in her an advocate of the individual's freedom to
love, an advocate who, by boldly defying the feudal, patriarchal
authorities, brought the whole system of their sexist injustice down
upon her.
I shall, however, leave the literary and political readings of this
tale to others and look instead to other texts and contexts in order
to peel off the various layers of this tale, to find certain
internal dynamics that can just as well account for the tale's
transformations in time. Although my investigation into myth and
folklore types can be accused of ending up with bare bones and no
flesh, folklore types (and mythic structures too) are ultimately
"intended as a tool and not a terminus" of research (Eberhard 1965,
xiv).(1) And even as we unpack the story, we shall also put the
pieces back together, adding thereby, as it were, muscle and sinews
that will "flesh out" the developing character and plot. By
overlaying folklore upon folklore, myth upon myth, we might see how
the literate theater of "The Flooding of the Golden Mountain" came
about. Not individual authorship, but some shared imagination, is
responsible for that dramatic script.
EARLY MYTHS OF MAN-GOD ENCOUNTERS
Let us begin with a paraphrase of another "Story of the Serpent"
that is recognizably a variant of the tale of Madame White Snake
(Eberhard 1965, 173-75). It concerns a giant serpent that resided
underground in an isle on a lake. With its mouth masquerading as a
giant lotus blossom, it devoured alive all those who mistook the
flower as a gateway to Amitabha's Pure Land. The pious threw
themselves into the flower and were eaten alive by the chthonic
monster. That is, until a righteous official saw through its
deception. Pouring gunpowder and quicklime into its gaping mouth,
the official exposed--literally exploded--the demonic treachery. The
first half of this story resonates with the Ur-myth of Madame White
Snake as a man-eating monster located at a lake.
Eberhard's notation to the tale points to a common source for both
tales, one involving
the periodic sacrifice of a maiden to a river deity; the sacrifice
takes
the form of a marriage of the girl to the deity. In this form, the
tale was known before the Christian era. . . . The gunpowder and
quicklime in our tale are innovations. Early texts have the official
either personally enter the water and fight the spirit or send the
priests into the river to announce the sacrifice. By so doing, the
official abolished the heretic cult. (Eberhard 1965, 237)
Two famous early stories come to mind. The "official who entered the
water" refers best to the exploits of Erlang, sometimes called
Erlang Shen (god). Erlang is a river god. He is to China as Krishna
is to India. Krishna also killed a multi-headed Hydra at a lake. But
if Erlang was a river god, that would mean that he was not simply a
hero who battled the river and stemmed its killing flood. In his
other persona as the river, he was the author of the flood. This
explains the two faces of Madame White Snake. As a heroine, she
saved her family from a flood--the first flood. As a demon, she
called up the same flood in her battle with Guanyin to help drown
the golden mountain and its temple. A cousin to both Erlang and
Madame White is known in Chinese history as the Sage-King Yu. Yu was
the dragon who stemmed the Great Flood by digging deep the channels
of the river bed. However, Yu also chased away those other dragons,
the "dragons of chaos," that infested China when the flood covered
the land. More on this Janus of a god later.
The official "who sent the priests into the river to announce the
sacrifice" reminds us of Ximen Bao. Ximen Bao had just taken up
office at Ye N when he came upon a local cult wherein a maiden was
sacrificed yearly as a bride for the god of the Yellow River. Bao
ended that licentious cult by throwing the female shamans into the
waters to announce a temporary delay in the marriage. Upon
inspection, though, we can see how the river god, He Bo, is really
just another Krishna. He Bo frolicked with the nymphs of the rivers,
all of whom were routinely counted as his consorts. Krishna made the
same claim. In a well-known episode loved by Hindu votaries, Krishna
bathed in the river with the gopis and mated with every one of them.
But the god's love was so individually tailored that each gopi had
the pleasure of thinking she had the lord all to herself and herself
alone. That a lake has many streams feeding it and a river many
tributaries can, in part, account for the physiology of this
licentiously polygamous Hydra-Krishna-He Bo.
If we look closer, then, as I have demonstrated (Lai 1990), Ximen
Bao did not exactly save a maiden fair from some Dracula. What are
now remembered, in the Confucian redaction of the tale, as "ugly,
old hags" whom Bao merrily threw into the river, were, in the same
script, none other than the brides. The shamans were the lovers of
He Bo during the spring festival. The Ximen Bao story only conflates
the orgy of a Maypole festival in spring with the sacrificial rite
of fall. The two events make up the cycle of Eros and Thanatos. The
Eros half celebrates a man-god romance; the Thanatos half remembers
the cannibalistic death and rebirth of the victims. Cast into that
larger drama, the seduction of the young man by Madame White at lake
side, fore-shadowing immanent death, only tells half of that story.
Love and sex are a natural part of these fertility myths turned
tales. Love can transport mortal man to immortal heaven; sex can be
a rendezvous in hell. Since sexual intercourse is yin meeting yang,
it is a play of cosmic forces, a "peak experience," sometimes
compared to a battle--a war of the sexes--but more often seen as a
harmony of opposites leading to general health and long life. As
such, it is worthy of being described as a dalliance with xian
immortals (Gulik 1974). Death and immortality are mixed in the
"Story of the Serpent" above. The serpent's mouth is a gateway to
the netherworld as well as the door to Pure Land. It has the same
function as the mouth of the old taotie. The realm of the Taoist
immortals had just been upgraded, in this medieval tale, to being
the Buddhist paradise of Amitabha. As sex is divine, sex can also be
demonic. And in medieval times, we will find the classic nymphs of
the Lo River (Luoshui shenxian) demonized into this life-draining
succubus of a Madame White Snake. More on that later.
ENCOUNTER WITH IMMORTALS, RUN-IN WITH GHOSTS
Before the medieval demonization, the Han Chinese already separated
the encounter with gods from the encounter with demons. They
produced two separate genres with very different structures. It is
hard to say when the split occurred. In the Songs of the South, we
have only the man-god romances (Hawkes 1962). By Han, the Confucian
condemnation of shamanic and licentious cults had effectively turned
He Bo, the river god, from being Prince Charming to being a Dirty
Old Man in the tale of Ximen Bao now found in the Historical Records
of Sima Qian.
So perhaps it is fitting that by Han, the romance of "fortuitous
encounter" with immortals was set apart from the horror of
"unfortunate run-in" with the devil. Encounter is hui, as in hui
shenming (meeting the gods). Hui tells originally of a rite whereby
the gods are invited to come down to the altar--this is still done
at Shinto shrines in Japan--so that men and gods can "get together."
We find remnants of this cult told in the psychic chapters of the
Guanzi. When such encounters were secularized, the meeting was no
longer ritually planned; it was simply, "fortuitous." Such a chance
meeting is called yu, the same word that is used nowadays to
describe a brief, erotic affair. That change from hui to yu results
from taking a once-prescribed "rite of passage" out of context. The
predictable is now just the fortuitous.
In China, gods are orderly and predictable; ghosts are not. A
"run-in" with ghosts is just as accidental, or fortuitous (in the
bad sense of misfortune). The Chinese colloquial expression
describing the worst of all luck is "seeing a ghost in broad
daylight." The Cantonese in their less refined language simply call
it tsong guai, now used as a regular cuss word for anything
unbecoming. We shall look first at a case of a "fortuitous encounter
with an immortal" before we do a run-in with a devil.(2)
The classic story of a good encounter, known to all Chinese, is that
of "Dong Yong Fortuitously Encountering a Female Immortal." The poor
but hard-working Dong won, somehow, the heart of a female immortal,
who came down to earth to be his wife. Upon their first meeting by
chance, Dong was such a Confucian prude that he was not sure whether
or not it was right for him to talk to this beautiful stranger.
After all, they had not been properly introduced. So she bad to make
the first move. Even the proposal of marriage had to come from her.
Even then, she had to call on a huai tree--a tree of fertility--to
be their go-between and witness. She became, as expected, a model
wife. With all the felicity of offspring and wealth she brought him,
Dong remained a model breadwinner, hard-working and frugal, to the
end. The tale ends when her time on earth has come to an end. After
revealing her true identity, she takes her leave. And Dong takes her
departure rather well.
Thus everything is kosher and morally proper in this story. Dong was
a gentleman from beginning to end. He was not out looking for a
brief romance; juicy sex is not a part of this tale. He persisted in
being a hard worker; indulgence in love, as happened to the Oxherd
and the Weaver, who became lazybones,(3) was not his style. When she
left--all good things must end--he took it with stoic gratitude. He
did not foolishly pine and chase after her as Archer Yi would.
(Archer Yi [of the east], in an exercise of futility went after his
wife, Heng E, after she, the goddess of the moon, fled to the west
[where the moon rises].)
This tale of a "prim and proper" Dong Yong, codified in Han by
moralistic Confucianism, is a marked departure from the freer sexual
mores of the older Songs of the South. The south was the home of
shamans, sufficiently far away from Lu, the home of Confucius. In
the southern lakes and streams, female shamans mated with He Bo just
as readily as male shamans would woo the beautiful Lady of the Lake.
Love affairs between man and god were frequent (seasonal) happenings
and not labelled as "confusing the distinctions of names and ranks,"
as Confucians would be prone to do. Confucius, following the Zhou
Enlightenment, had accepted the transcendence of Heaven. But back in
the days of the Shang that preceded the Zhou, the supreme deity, or
Shangdi, probably fathered the house of Shang. This Lord on High
probably came down in the form of the "dark bird" (Japan's
yatagarasu) and impregnated the ancestress of the royal house. That
was a classic hui shenming scene before Confucian historians rewrote
it into a "fortuitous encounter" in which the Shang ancestress is
stepping on a giant bird's footprint or swallowing a bird's egg "by
chance" on some outing "in the fields or woods."
Patriarchy had, by the Han, redacted many of these early myths. By
then it was deemed improper for single women to go walking alone in
the woods (site of the old suburban rite) and get themselves
pregnant (by strangers). Female immortals, however, could still come
down from Heaven and grace such lucky fellows as Dong Yong with
their favors. These are often known as banished immortals "on
temporary exile from Heaven." Male immortals in Confucian China lost
that freedom. They rarely came down to marry some lucky women. Zeus
they were not. Men could have affairs with heavenly maidens, but to
have women sleeping around with gods and producing offspring would
create havoc with the standard, patrilineal genealogies!
If the Han tale of Dong Yong represents "fortuitous encounter," then
the Wei-Jin zhiguai (records of strange happenings) would be our
ghost stories about "run-ins with the devil." The former spoke up
for Confucian mores; the latter for Taoist fascination with the
unknown. Unlike the former, which is so on the up-and-up as never to
titillate the reader's baser instincts, the latter has more
entertainment value. Actually, though, the Wei-Jin tales are so
matter-of-fact (they were counted as "history" and not as "story"),
short, and unembellished that they are more strange incidents than
truly horrifying, Gothic tales. Ghosts appeared and then
disappeared, with seemingly little rationale. Anyone, just or
unjust, could be met with such visitations. There is no karmic
theodicy to make sure that the just were blessed and the unjust
cursed. Sex was neither particularly glamorized nor condemned. There
was no subgenre of "man-ghost romance" as such.
For stories with sufficient sex and violence, which is what we have
in the mature tales of Madame White Snake, one would have to wait
nearly a millennium, for works produced in Song and embellished
(especially) in Ming. That is not just because the popular press,
dated to Ming, could then better cater to the grosser interests of a
larger population. Whether we like it or not, sex and violence--to
mimic Freud--do build character, not just in lives but also in
stories. These two demons of lust and aggression rise from the depth
of the id to provoke the censor from the superego, and in so
threatening the ego, also dare it to take better charge of its life.
Maturity comes with being slave neither to the id of the instincts
nor to the superego of one's society. Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism
fostered that.
Like the Puritans of Europe, the Neo-Confucians popularized
asceticism in a cult of rational self-control. It worked at building
character through self-imposed hardship and by resisting
temptations. Like the Puritans, they were not always successful and
their plans sometimes backfired. Repression takes its revenge. So by
condemning literary fantasy--it runs counter to their rational,
sober life-style--the Neo-Confucians helped to promote it. The Ming
novel embodied those very "guilty pleasures" denied the parlor
readers in their real life. The novels tell of those "forbidden
fruits" and then, in the last minute, append their proper
punishment. The Story of Madame White Snake is one such Gothic
romance. Before the final curtain falls on the Wicked Woman who
caused it all, we are treated to the delicious breaking of all the
social taboos and the pleasures that come with it.
So in this morality tale, the young man was no Dong Yong. He was a
listless, lesser literatus, easily aroused to erotic fantasy by the
sight of a winsome beauty. He sought her out--with no proper
introduction--and she, single and with no chaperone, just as boldly,
reciprocated. As if that was not enough, she turned out to live in a
gorgeous mansion. In short, wealth and sex, what most men wish for,
was his for the asking. That is the escapist half of the tale. Moral
censor followed soon enough. The fantasy is too good to be true.
There was the crude awakening that the price of sin is death. On
that sour note, the tale ends.
Such tales of seduction were very real at one time. Today, thanks to
Freud, we call it sexual fantasy. Since it is our sexual fantasy, we
are responsible for it. In medieval times, it was known as
possession. The evil is not within us; it comes from a source
without. When a young man from a good Chinese family falls in love
with a village beauty of low social standing, he might pine for her
and suffer nightly the "love sickness" that drains his vitality
(essence/semen). Since goodness is thought to come from being born
into a good family, it is common practice at one time to accuse the
"fox lady" with bewitching the lad. His family might seek her out
and beat her up for transporting herself into his wet dreams. The
Gothic romance of Madame White Snake is a tale to us, but it was a
feasible happening then.
THE MORAL METAPHYSICS OF ASCENT AND DESCENT
A female immortal descends to assume human form to marry Dong Yong.
A snake spirit ascends and masquerades as a beautiful woman to
entice men. In either case, the female crosses over into the realm
of man. Neither stays in that realm forever. Banished immortals are
temporary exiles only. Animal spirits seduce men only at a
way-station upward bound. The good among animal spirits who help
rather than harm man may graduate to being xian immortals; the evil
ones attain immortality, but only as yao demons. In time, exiled
immortals will fly off. In sleep, when drunk, or during exorcism,
animal spirits may revert to their subhuman form. The diagram below
shows the typical movements involved in descent and ascent:
for gods and immortals for ghosts and demons
--immortal temporarily exiled --demon on an upward climb
--descends into humanity --ascends into human form
--picks a deserving man --preys on a hapless youth
--a helpful wife of virtue --a partner of the flesh
--a mother to boot --usually without offspring
--a boon to her mate --a kiss of death
--returns to heaven --is imprisoned underground
The above shows two separate destinies. The power of the mature
story of Madame White Snake is due to its mixing of the two.
What began as a tale of demonic possession (upper-right box) turns
halfway into the demon taking over the good qualities of an exiled
immortal middle-left box) before returning to the original ending
(lower-right box). Madame White Snake grew into the faithful wife,
the loving mother, the benefactor of men. What Hsu documented as the
successive humanization of the White Snake is simply this shift in
the axis of her conduct. Her tragedy is that her demonic past would
not let her be. Or, even if she was ready to forgo it, those
hounding her would not let her.
We can almost pinpoint her transformation from malevolent to
benevolent spirit: it came with motherhood. Full family life, the
foundation of Confucian virtues, changed her. It appears that
Chinese demonology does not encourage a cult of "Rosemary's Baby."
Christianity believes in divine and demonic progeny, but Buddhist
karma disallows a biological inheritance of good or evil. As for
Taoist immortals, they apparently do not father immortal offsprings,
just normal, healthy, human babies. Maybe that is because gods in
China were originally men (Allen 1979). Man-demon encounters seem to
involve good sex for its own sake without producing children of
darkness, though folk belief does entertain possibilities such as
the operatic one of an empress said to have given birth to a fox or
a bobcat.
We may be unnecessarily specific here. Chinese folklore, like
folklore all over the world, has no trouble with "grateful animals"
marrying men and producing families. Swan Lady and Snow Woman never
disqualified themselves from childbearing, either. It is the moral
metaphysics of developed cultures that set up such unreasonable
paternity requirements. In the Chinese variant of Swan Lake, called
"The Bank of the Celestial Stream" (Eberhard 1965, 43-44), morality
was never an issue. Virtue might be assumed in the Weaver and the
Oxherd, but the tale is equally a tale of guile: his stealing of her
clothes and her retrieving of her magical feathered gown.
THE DEMONIZATION OF THE RIVER NYMPH
Put the Swan Lady at a river inlet and we see a nymph of the waters.
Transport Madame White Snake back in time and her seduction of men
would just be another innocent dalliance with such nymphs at lake
side. The difference is that during the medieval fascination with
ascetics, the nymph saw herself turned into and hunted as the much
feared witch.
That had yet to happen during the Han. The yin-yang of sex was then
deemed healthy and Taoist bedchamber books endorsed the mutual
gratification of male and female during intercourse. China did have
a misconception. Whatever Laozi had said of the inexhaustible Mystic
Female notwithstanding, the medical opinion was that the male had a
greater supply of yang than the female had of yin, for menopause
seems to terminate her fertility. She needed to draw on the male to
become fertile. With that came a fear of the female "stealing" the
yang from the male. Medieval ascetics fueled that fear. And the
promiscuous nymph became a succubus who visits men at night to suck
dry their vital forces. There were mythic femmes fatales before: the
Great Earth Mother who dines on her children appeared in China as a
motherly tigress and the taotie on Shang bronzes. But the succubus
was a medieval creation.
As sex haunted the Buddha and St. Anthony, water nymphs fell from
grace. Just as their male counterparts, the fertile satyrs, would
reappear as aspects of the Devil in the West and "cow-head" and
"horse-face" messengers from Buddhist hells in the East, river
goddesses became Mara's (the Devil's) daughters. Because in China
sexual intercourse was a matter of mixing "cloud and rain,"
seduction by Eros regularly took place at aquatic sites. It is not
that the virile mountain, home of the clouds (the male fluid), has
no role. Wushan was not called "shamanic hills" for no reason.
Nonetheless, water is the preferred haunt. This went back to the
Lady of the Lake in the Songs of the South, what Edward Schafer has
traced to the poetics of Tang as the tradition of the Divine Woman:
Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens (Schafer 1980).
With the waters given over to being the erotic playgrounds of Rain
Maidens and She-Demons, the mountains became associated more with
the abode of the ascetic, usually male and celibate. But what Raoul
Birnbaum sees as a pattern in the vision quest on China's sacred
mountains appears as a mirror image of what happens in an erotic
quest at the enchantress's watery lair (Birnbaum 1988).
The vision quest of the ascetic involves a rite of passage. Guided
by a psychopomp, he crosses over to a different reality, usually by
crossing a bridge, a river, or a gate. To his surprise, he finds
there a gorgeous mansion or palace. Wined and dined, he stays there
awhile before he makes the return trip. Once he crosses that bridge
or gate, though, he turns around to find the mansion or palace gone.
That vision of a mandalic mansion or palace (the sacred axis mundi)
is central to the mystical experience. In China, these are
associated with the hetu and the luoshu [river diagram and writing]
or with the maps of heavens and grottos in the Shangqing
cosmography.
We find nearly identical episodes in our story of seduction. Instead
of the mountain, it is the water. Instead of asceticism, it is
eroticism. The young man also remembered passing through a gate when
he visited her home. Beyond the gate stood a grand mansion. He was
wined and dined. He stayed overnight. He left only to find on return
that, instead of a mansion, there was this abandoned graveyard. Look
more closely and the tale is told with a powerful set of symbols
drawn from some remote memory.
A man and a woman met--where else, but where land and water, yang
and yin, met. When? During a festival to view the seasonal rise of
the tide. This is, in ancient times, the Merrie Month of May, when
"male and female mingled all too freely together" to celebrate the
fertility of life. The stolen glances at a public place led to the
secret rendezvous, with Little Green the snake playing the
psychopomp. The man left the city limit (order) for the suburb
(chaos), crossed to the other side of life (death: graveyard). The
pleasure of the night, with intimation of immortality, turned, in
the light of day, to have been an affair with a demon. Exorcism was
performed by a Taoist, a "man of the mountain" in pursuit of the
flight (dance) of birds (immortals). He subdued the nymph of the
waters.
Let us not forget the meal. In a tradition where there is not a
sharp dichotomy of body and soul, ingestion of material is
tantamount to a flight of the spirit. In the vision quest, food
amounts to access to immortality--like the peaches of the Queen
Mother of the West. In demonic possession, the diner is actually the
one being dined upon. Either way, the meal goes back to the
cannibalistic feast of He Bo, the River God, who married fair
maidens and/or dined on them as Dracula would his brides. Here is a
simple but chilling tale of the same, told in the Luoyang qielan ji,
a record of the temples found in this city on the sunny side of the
River Lo:
(My paraphrase) A certain soldier visited an old comrade-in-arms
on a trip. He stayed over at the latter's beautiful home, having
been well wined and dined. He woke up on the bank of the Yellow
River (near Luoyang). Next to him was the wine goblet of the
night before--the skull of a man who had drowned the previous
day [and whose blood he had drunk].
Ancient gods like He Bo used to depend on blood sacrifice to stay
alive. Madame White Snake did only what any good enchantress living
on her sacred isle would do: made a meal of her mates as Circe did.
THE FORGOTTEN OTTER AND THE PRIMAL UNITY
[DIAGRAM OMITTED]
Only one item remains to be explained: the otter. The Black Otter is
the proper companion of the White Snake. The substitution for it of
Little Green the snake--based on the later East-West icon of "Green
Dragon, White Tiger"--forgets that, as an agent of death, the White
Snake is better served by the Black Otter, at one point the icon of
the wintry north and of death.
And Otter should go with Snake. This odd couple went as far back as
Sage-King Yu--the Dragon (Snake) that stopped the flood--and his
father Gun. Gun, who tried building up the river levee, has been
identified as the otter. Once upon a time, as father and son, Gun-Yu
represented the cycle of the year. When split into two, Gun would be
remembered as the proud fool who aggravated the flood while Yu was
the diligent hero who tamed it. Together they represent the two
faces of the Yellow River, the bed of Chinese culture (Lai 1984).
Rivers have defined the myths of other cultures. The Nile of Egypt
is remembered in myth as regular and benevolent; the Twin Rivers of
ancient Babylonia are remembered as a perpetual threat. The Yellow
River has the character of both: life-giving in its good years, and
life-taking when it floods. It is Gun and Yu rolled into one. Even
Yu the Dragon only tamed a flood that the dragons of chaos caused.
His alias, He Bo the River God, has the same Janus of a face: he is
Prince Charming as well as man-eater, auspicious long (dragon) and
tempestuous jiao (kraken). By the same token, the Rain Maiden and
the Snake Demon were one.
In other words, the medieval demonization of the nymph might have
only radicalized the two faces of the Yellow River. Even as the
nymph was vilified for her promiscuity, who else should appear as
victor but her alter ego, the virgin goddess Guanyin. Medusa was
being tamed by Athena. In the still larger order of things, the
story of Madame White Snake is well known in China because it is
about a struggle between good and evil--not just between the demon
and Guanyin "out there," not just between a woman warrior and a
male-dominated society either--but, in some ultimate sense, between
the two halves of the Chinese soul.
That is because in China's anthropogeny myth, this dragon nature was
in Emperor Kongjia. As emperor, he was himself a dragon. Heaven
graced his reign with a gift of dragons, but unable to "feed"
(nurse) this gift, he foolishly "ate" (violated) the trust. For that
sin, he died. This dragon nature that Heaven gave us, Mencius
(Mengzi) would find good and Xunzi would call evil. Nurse it well
and it will serve us. Violate it and it will destroy us. The beauty
of the mature story of Madame White Snake is that, being born a
demon, she had the cards stacked against her, but, for the greater
part of her popular opera, she overcame that indictment by Xunzi of
her innate evilness. She nursed well that Mencian mind of compassion
for family and kin, behaving more like a banished immortal than a
demon on the prowl. Other players in her story are creatures of
circumstance, but Madame White Snake rose above her destiny. She was
the character that truly moved the plot--not vice versa--and grew in
the process.(4) She managed to stay one step ahead of her
pursuers--until, of course, her last confrontation and final
capture. Almost in self-defense, she struck back, unleashing all the
dark powers in her being. And, in a rather unforgiving world of man
and gods, socio-karmic justice took its toll on a soul that tried so
hard to do good.
NOTES
(1.) From the "Foreword" by Richard M. Dorson, who makes this remark
while reviewing a controversy over folklore studies in the PRC in
the period 1957-63. (2.) At the national convention of the American
Academy of Religions held at New Orleans in November 1990, where an
earlier draft of this paper was read, Russell Kirkland (Stanford
University) made the argument that frequently the zhiquai ghost
stories were about a cosmic imbalance between this world and the
other world that called for a restoration of harmony. (3.) The
popular version of this tale now has the two lovers so in love as to
neglect their work, and therefore, to enforce the Confucian stress
on duties, the two were separated. But the Book of Songs remembers a
Weaver who could not finish weaving and an Oxherd whose ox could not
plough. Such "work never being done" points to their being variants
of the Sisyphus myths, telling of constantly changing stars and
moon. (4.) On a future occasion I hope to use Paul Ricoeur's theory
of the "Narrative Self"--dealing with the dialectics of the changing
character and changing plot--to analyze the freedom (as well as the
limits of freedom) of the individual human will in this and other
premodern Chinese stories.
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