Archaeologists in Sichuan Province, China announced this week that they have discovered evidence of ancient attempts to communicate with fairies. Caches of bronze, jade, and gold artifacts were discovered, as well as evidence of ancient sacrificial rituals. According to scientists, some of the artifacts are one-of-a-kind objects that hint at the “fairytale world” of ancient Chinese religion and thought. But if you’re picturing folk religion and Tinkerbell, think again.
The discoveries were made at the famous Sanxingdui archaeological site in the city of Guanghan in southwestern Sichuan province. The real treasure was excavated from sacrificial pits 7 and 8 by a joint team of scientists from Peking University and Sichuan University. Among the items was a box of bronze and green jade that was decorated with dragon head handles and had once been kept wrapped in silk. Professor Li Haichao of Sichuan University, who oversees Pit 7, told Chinese news agencies that “it would not be an exaggeration to say that the vessel is one of a kind, given its distinctive shape, fine craftsmanship and ingenious design “.
The collection of intricate sculptures includes mythical creatures, human-snake hybrids and bronze heads adorned with golden masks. The iconographic program of the sculptures located primarily in Pit 8 is “complex and imaginative”. Zhao Hao, as an associate professor at Peking University, said they reflect “the fairy-tale world that people imagined at the time and demonstrate the diversity and richness of Chinese civilization.”
The finds attracted a lot of attention not only because of the site’s historical significance, but also because of the use of the word “fairy” in media statements. But “fairy” may be a misleading term here. The term derives from Old English (Fae) from Old French (faie) and refers to women who were skilled in magic or enchanted things and illusions. In pop culture, the word fairy is most often associated in English-speaking countries with Tinkerbell or, if you want to consider yourself cultured, with Puck: winged, often diminutive magical creatures associated with forests, garden bottoms and wishes. In Chinese mythology, beings described as “fairies” are often more powerful spirits associated with specific places, particularly mountains, rivers, and oceans.
These “spirits” can be benevolent or malevolent, and are sometimes associated with former human beings or animals who have been transformed into local guardian spirits, ancestral spirits, and deities. The Guardian Spirit (Jingwei) of Departing-Doves Mountain, for example, transforms into the Guardian Spirit Bird when it drowns in the East Sea. Ex-mortal, Strasbourg Chinese bestiary describes her as both “goddess” and “guardian spirit” and notes that Taoists identify her as “transcendent [human]” and that in modern China it is “a symbol of someone who refuses to accept defeat”. Jingwei’s story is one of metamorphosis, and this fluidity is only heightened by the changing interpretations of her status over time.
However, the use of the word “fairy” in news reports is illuminating not only for what it tells us about the discovery in question, but also for the ways in which it exposes the exclusion of fairies from Western supernatural consciousness. If you look up “fairy” in the Cambridge English Dictionary, you’ll learn that fairies are “imaginary.” Look up the more Christian-friendly “angel” and you’ll find a complete lack of existential judgement.
All this means that communicating with angels, spirits, and fairies are not different activities. If talking to fairies sounds crazy, but making sacrifices to the spirits seems expected, then we’re just tripping over the cultural biases of our own Christian-oriented English. In the irrevocably hierarchical patchwork pantheon of Anglo-American culture, fairies sit at the bottom of the rankings with no chance of promotion. But Chinese mythology does not share our assumptions and distinctions. If the current interpretation is correct, then the people in Sanxingdui were in contact with beings that could easily be described as spirits or gods. The language of “fairies” captures the ways in which Chinese spirits and deities were often animal-human hybrids, but aesthetically, as the Sanxingdui images reveal, they were quite different. You won’t find pixie cuts here.
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China News Service
Although scientists have not released exact dates for the latest finds, the Sanxingdui ruins are 3,500-4,800 years old, and experts said the artifacts are approximately 3,000-4,500 years old. They are of immense importance for what they reveal about the Shu civilization, which flourished in the region until 316 BC (when the region was conquered by the Qing dynasty). Archaeological research is the main way to reconstruct this otherwise mysterious civilization, as literary references to the Shu state are largely mythological and date from the fourth century BCE. The Chronicles of Huayang.
Previous studies of finds from Sanxingdui noted that the culture that flourished there during the Bronze Age was contemporary with that of the Shang Dynasty and shared some common elements with its mythology and religion. Not the least of these is the use of bronze sacrificial gifts as a means of communicating with spirits. (This interpretation of the pits is contested: Chen Shen argued in a 2002 book that the pits may have been burial pits rather than sacrificial sites. There were no human remains in the pits).
In a report on a bronze statue found in Sacrificial Pit 1, Shen Zhongchang and Robert Jones wrote that during this period “spirits were specially worshipped” in this way in the Shan religion. At the same time, as Robert Bagley writes, “There is nothing in Shang archeology to prepare us for a bronze sculpture of the size and sophistication” found in Pit 1. Bagley argues that “The sacrificial ritual that produced the two [Sanxingdui] pits [1 and 2 ] has no exact parallel elsewhere in Chinese archeology and can only be related in the most general way” to the rituals found by archaeologists at other Shang sites. Ran Honglin of the Research Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology of Sichuan Province said of the recent finds that some elements of the sculpture are similar to objects from the Zhou Dynasty.
In other words, the Sanxingdui finds are extremely important for what they can tell us about the contacts between different kingdoms in ancient China, the development of metallurgical technology, and ancient Chinese religious rituals. The discovery of these more elaborate and ornate sacrificial offerings helps to color our rough sketch of both Shu cosmology and culture and what Honglin calls “the early exchange and integration of Chinese civilization.” When Professor Hao talked about the “fairytale world”, the focus of his statement was actually on the “diversity and richness of Chinese civilization”. Reports of ancient Chinese fairies, however compelling, do not represent both the ancient divine spirits and the significance of the findings.
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