Shu, Lord of Nature

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.

Domains

• wild nature
• water rain fertility
• serpents and aquatic creatures

Powers

• to rule the mountains, waters, and wild creatures as their spirit-owner
• to inflict sickness and disaster or to grant fertility and prosperity

Epithets

• Llü-munJoseph F. Rock, The Na-khi Nāga Cult and Related Ceremonies, 2 vols., Serie Orientale Roma IV (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1952). (secondary)

Relations

• half sibling: Coqssei-leel'ee, First Ancestor of the NaxiThe foundational Dongba teaching that humankind and nature are half-brothers, sharing one father but born of two different mothers, makes Shu the half-sibling of the human line descending from the first ancestor Coqssei-leel'ee; their quarrel over the wild and its ritual settlement is the charter myth of the Naxi nature cult.Erik Mueggler, "Crimes Against Nature: Kincest, Cosmology, and Conservation in Southwest China," Anthropological Forum 27, no. 4 (2017): 339–364. (secondary); Pedro Ceinos-Arcones, Sons of Heaven, Brothers of Nature: The Naxi of Southwest China (Kunming: Papers of the White Dragon, 2012). (secondary)
• companion: See, God of LifeShu, the spirit of nature, and See, the spirit of life, are paired in the Dongba religion as twin life-giving powers that accompany and sustain living beings; comparative study treats them as closely linked, possibly as two hypostases of a single ancestral life-deity."The Genius Universal: A Comparison among Dongba, Ancient Greek, and Archaic Roman Religions," Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia 2, no. 1 (2022). (secondary)

Sources

• Shu (Ssu) is the serpent-bodied lord and mother of wild nature in the Dongba religion of the Naxi, the half-sibling of humankind, propitiated as owner of mountains, waters, and animals and equated by scholars with the Indic nāga and Tibetan klu.: Joseph F. Rock, The Na-khi Nāga Cult and Related Ceremonies, 2 vols., Serie Orientale Roma IV (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1952). (secondary); Xi Yuhua, "Shu: Naxi Nature Goddess Archetype," Gender, Technology and Development 6, no. 3 (2002): 409–422. (secondary); Erik Mueggler, "Crimes Against Nature: Kincest, Cosmology, and Conservation in Southwest China," Anthropological Forum 27, no. 4 (2017): 339–364. (secondary)