Wu (shaman)

Terminology

The earliest known form of the character for wu appears in bronze inscriptions, where it denoted shamans or sorcerers of any gender. In modern Mandarin, wu (Cantonese mouh) comes from Middle Chinese mju or mjo. Reconstructions of Old Chinese are debated, with possibilities like mywo or myag, though whether a final velar -g or -ɣ existed remains unclear. By the late Zhou period, wu mainly referred to female shamans or sorceresses, while male counterparts were called xi, first recorded in the Guoyu.

Other gendered terms include nanwu for male shamans and nüwu, wunü, wupo, and wuyu for female ones. Wu appears in compounds such as wugu (sorcery), wushen or shenwu (wizard or sorcerer), and wuxian (immortal shaman). The word tongji serves as a near-synonym for wu. To differentiate the native term from the Siberian shaman, Chinese uses phonetic loans like saman.

The word shaman is also rendered using Buddhist transcriptions of Shramana, such as shamen. Joseph Needham proposed that shaman was transliterated as xianmen in the name of Zou Yan’s disciple Xianmen Gao. He cites the Shiji, noting that Emperor Qin Shi Huang searched for immortals and xianmen along the eastern coast. Needham also compares later terms: shanman, used for the Jurchen leader Wanyan Xiyin, and sizhu, employed for Manchu shamans during the Qing dynasty.

Early records of wu

The oldest written records of wu are Shang dynasty oracle inscriptions and Zhou dynasty classical texts. Boileau notes the disparity of these sources. Concerning the historical origin of the wu, the present state of the documentation does not allow a conclusion that they were a remnant of an earlier stage of archaic Chinese civilization, for two reasons: the most abundant data about the wu are found in Eastern Zhou texts, and these texts have little in common with data originating directly from the Shang civilization.

Possible ancestors of the Eastern Zhou wu are the cripples and females burned in sacrifice to bring about rain, mentioned in oracular inscriptions, but there is no mention of the Shang character wu. Because of the scarcity of information, many activities of the Zhou wu cannot be traced back to the Shang period. Shima lists 58 occurrences of the character wu in a concordance of oracle inscriptions: 32 in repeated compounds, most commonly wu spirit/sacrifice and bring the wu, and 26 in miscellaneous contexts.

Boileau differentiates four meanings of these oracular wu: a spirit, wu of the north or east, to which sacrifices are offered; a sacrifice possibly linked to controlling wind or meteorology; an equivalent for shi, a form of divination using achilea; and a living human being, possibly the name of a person, tribe, place, or territory. The inscriptions about this living wu reveal six characteristics: whether the wu is a man or a woman is not known; it could be either the name for a function or the name of a people coming from a definite territory or nation; the wu seems to have been in charge of some divinations; the wu is seen as offering a sacrifice of appeasement, but the inscription suggests the wu was not the person of choice to conduct all such sacrifices; there is only one inscription where a direct link between the king and the wu appears, though the nature of the link is not known; and he follows the orders of other people, perhaps offered to the Shang as a tribute.

Modern Chinese folk religion

Chinese folk religion sometimes overlaps with shamanic traditions. In Fujian, hereditary shamans known as saigong were documented and illustrated by de Groot. In the Taiwanese village of Bao'an, research examined the mediumistic activities of tongji. Tungusic shamanic practices also appear in China, most prominently when the Manchu Qing dynasty incorporated them into their official state cult. Further traces of Tungusic shamanism survive within modern China, such as Chuonnasuan, recognized as the final shaman of the Oroqen people in the northeast.