Reading Xiwangmu Off Han Tomb Walls and Mirrors

Han dynasty tomb art gives Xiwangmu a visual record independent of any text, and it is largely through that record that scholars trace her rise to prominence. She appears repeatedly on carved stone reliefs, painted tomb murals and cast bronze mirrors of the Eastern Han, enthroned frontally on a mountain or on a dragon-and-tiger seat, flanked by attendants that commonly include a nine-tailed fox, a three-legged toad and a hare pounding the herb of immortality with mortar and pestle. The mirrors are especially informative: a common design pairs her with a King Father of the East in symmetrical positions around the mirror's boss, a pairing barely attested in surviving texts, which suggests the visual cult of the two developed its own logic somewhat ahead of, or apart from, the literary tradition.

Art historians including Wu Hung have used this tomb material, including the well documented Wu Liang shrine reliefs in Shandong, to argue that Xiwangmu's Han-era popularity as a promise of posthumous immortality for the tomb's occupant preceded her later, fuller elaboration into the supreme goddess of Daoist scripture. The archaeological record therefore does not simply illustrate an already-formed myth; in places it appears to run ahead of it.