Shu, recorded by Joseph Rock in the orthography Ssu and also called Llü-mun, is the lord of wild nature in the Dongba religion of the Naxi, a serpent-bodied being depicted as a human-snake chimera and identified by Rock with the nāga of India, the klu of Tibet, and the dragon (long) of China. Shu owns the mountains, forests, rivers, springs, and all the wild and aquatic creatures of the world. The central charter of Naxi religion holds that humankind and nature are half-brothers, born of one father but of two different mothers, who divided the world between them; when humans overstepped their share by hunting without limit, clearing forests, fouling water, and breaking soil, Shu retaliated with sickness, drought, and disaster. The quarrel is healed by the Dongba priest in the great Ssu-ddü-gv ceremony, where a treaty is renewed: humans honor Shu yearly and respect the boundaries of the wild, and Shu in turn grants rain, fertility, and the use of nature's bounty. In the creation myth recorded in the Coqbbertv manuscript the figure is gendered feminine, the vertical-eyed goddess who becomes Shu, the Mother of Nature; in Rock's ritual corpus the Ssu form a numerous serpent-people with their own kings, so the tradition encompasses both a singular personified lord of nature and a class of nāga-lords. The cult remains living among the Naxi, where the annual nature-propitiation continues to be observed.