36
here were the main social occasions at this time of the year when both rustic and urban people tried to benefit from the seasonal life forces of Nature.
The She Day was a fairly complex affair when people visited what appears to have been special public altars, to worship by making offerings of meat and wine. What these altars devoted to the She were like, we cannot know for sure. Probably they were not too different from their latter day counterparts made of concrete.44 What deity was the She? Sometimes the She was combined with the Ji into a more complex phenomenon. Demotically it seems likely that this agricultural earth god was conceived as one being. Sometimes it was male and had a female companion, perhaps a wife.45 At this point it seems advisable to consult what Sinology has to say.
46
Derk Bodde's studies of festivals in early China are helpful here. He describes how in the days of the two consecutive Han dynasties (206 BC-AD 220) the She and the Ji were thought of as a pair presiding over the country with 'sub-versions' presiding in a corresponding way hierarchically in every single administrative unit in the realm. The cult of the She Ji was a State ritual at the centre of the polity, in the hands of the Emperor in the capital and handled by his administrators and officials in the periphery. This cult of the She, or She Ji, can be traced back to ancient and even into archaic China, and it appears to be a very old institution in Chinese public life. Even in the pre-Han period of contending fiefdoms under the umbrella of a ritually defined Imperial dominance, the She or She Ji was—if seen as in unity—a deity that not only had a reference to agriculture and harvests but, furthermore, to death; there was an intimate connection between the altar of the She and the Imperial ‘ancestral temple.' It has been noted that in these ancient offerings the presentations to the altar was of raw meat, whereas the ancestors received food that had been cooked.47
Looking into medieval China we find that the worship of the She
44 In this the She is strikingly similar to the Stove God, prominent at the celebration of Little New Year in the region; see Aijmer 2001: Chapter 4.
45 Bodde 1975: 56, 252; see also Ch'ü 1972: 31.
46 Chavannes 1969: 507, 516, 519.
47 Yang 1969: 96-99; Faure 1986: 141.