Chinese

The Chinese gods are a civil service. The celestial order is arranged as a graded bureaucracy with the Jade Emperor at its head, ministries beneath him with defined portfolios, and local officials, the city gods and the earth gods, at the bottom of the hierarchy holding jurisdiction over precisely delimited territory. Petitions travel upward through channels, and offerings are made with documents that are burned to transmit them.

Because it is an administration, rank in it can change. Deities are promoted, given new titles, and occasionally demoted or stripped of recognition, and for long stretches of imperial history this was done by the state, which maintained registers of officially recognised gods and issued canonisations. The kitchen god's annual report on a household's conduct is the same logic in miniature.

The route in is therefore an appointment. Mazu was a girl on the Fujian coast; Guan Yu was a general who lost a war. Both were enrolled and repeatedly promoted, ending with titles that a living official would recognise as ranks. This is the sharpest contrast the atlas records with the Greek arrangement, where a mortal becomes divine through the merit of an extraordinary life rather than by decree.

There is no creator ruling this system. Pangu's body becomes the world as he dies, and Nuwa shapes human beings, but neither governs afterwards. The pantheon absorbed rather than excluded, taking in Buddhist figures, Daoist immortals and local gods without requiring them to agree with one another.

Chinese religion has no single canon and no central authority defining one, and the sources divide into kinds that were produced for entirely different reasons.

The oldest direct evidence is not literary at all. The oracle bones of the late Shang record divination addressed to ancestors and to a high power, and they survive because they were inscribed on bone and shell as an administrative act. They show a religion of royal ancestor consultation centuries before any of the texts a reader is likely to have heard of.

The Shanhaijing, a compilation of strange geography and its deities, preserves early material in a form that resists systematisation. The Daozang, the Daoist canon, is enormous, technical and largely liturgical, assembled over centuries and organised for practitioners rather than for readers seeking mythology.

Much of the narrative that ordinary people actually knew came from late vernacular fiction. The Fengshen Yanyi, a Ming novel, is where a great deal of the popular pantheon's arrangement was fixed in the public mind, and it is a work of entertainment that drew on existing cult rather than a record of doctrine.

Alongside all of this sits the imperial administrative record, which is unusually useful here: registers of recognised deities, canonisation edicts, temple gazetteers. When the state promoted a god it wrote the promotion down, so the career of a deity such as Mazu can be followed through official documents in a way that has no parallel in most other traditions.