Jiang Ziya
Chinese · mortal · zhou · Recorded classification
The premise of the book is an administrative one and he is the administrator: a war is fought, and the people killed in it are then appointed to divine offices from a roster, so that the Chinese popular pantheon is staffed by the casualties of the Shang-Zhou transition. Jiang Ziya holds the roster. Whatever one thinks of the novel as evidence for the eleventh century BC, it is unambiguously evidence for what sixteenth-century Chinese people believed about where their gods came from — and the registry held four of its minor characters and not the man with the list.
Domains
- strategy
- investiture
Relations
- subordinate to: King Wu of ZhouNominally. The book is his rather than the king's.Reference treatment of the rebellion led by Ji Fa with Jiang Ziya as his tactician. (secondary)
- enemy: Shen GongbaoHis opposite number, whose whole object is the list.Reference treatment of Shen Gongbao's attempt to trick Jiang Ziya into handing over and destroying the Fengshen List. (secondary)
- enemy: King Zhou of ShangThe king he brings down.Reference treatment of the Fengshen Yanyi as the campaigns between King Zhou of Shang and the Zhou founders, with Jiang Ziya as tactician of the rebellion. (secondary)
Sources
- Jiang Ziya is the protagonist of the Fengshen Yanyi, tactician of the Zhou rebellion under Ji Fa, to whom Yuanshi Tianzun gives the Fengshen Bang, the list by which he invests the gods of Heaven after the war.: Reference treatments of the Fengshen Yanyi, Jiang Ziya and the Fengshen Bang. (secondary)