Chinese deity Ce-shen: genesis of image

Ce-shen (廁神), deity of the latrine, is one of the most popular minor Gods of the Chinese folk religions. Its special role in the Lantern Festival divinations has been numerously noticed in both - collections of biji (筆記) or congshu (叢書) and in special researches on traditional Chinese beliefs and customs. Speaking of the latter, one major tendency can be observed: the figure of Ce-shen is inextricably linked in them with the image of Zi-gu (紫姑), a Purple Maiden, who is believed to be the deification of a real historic person - Qi-furen (戚夫人, 224-194 B.C.). Qi-furen, the youngest and most beloved wife of Liu Bang (劉邦, 256-195 B.C.), the founder of the Han dynasty, had bitterly suffered from the dowager empress Lü (呂太后, 241-180 B.C.) after Liu Bang’s death. The empress ordered to cripple and disfigure Qi-furen and place her in the latrine to die. Thus Ce-shen is usually interpreted as a sanctification of Qi-furen who has been vested with the power to supervise toilets and cesspools as the place of her suffering and death. Hence, this very orderly system doesn't properly work with the earliest written records on Ceshen and doesn't explain the divination power of the very deity. Thus the research is focused on examining and analysis of pre-Tang and Tang records and recreating original tendencies in Ce-shen worship. Short stories of the Six Dynasties and Tang period give us quite a number of totally different versions of the latrine deity. In some of them Ce-shen is described as an eminent official with an entourage, holding a seal and conducting with high decorum. In the others the God of toilet has a hideous appearance: deep-set eyes and a huge nose, a tiger’s mouth and bird’s claws, pitted purple skin and the like. The third set of sources presents Ce-shen as a hog all covered with eyes. No matter what look the deity takes, one of its main features remains the ability to foretell important things, the overriding of which being the inevitability of the imminent death. Thus Ce-shen commences being regarded as a mediator between this world and the afterworld; in the very same way the latrine acquires symbolic features of a special place for divinations and magic. These peculiarities give way to draw an analogy between toilets in the early medieval beliefs of the Chinese and the traditional bathhouse in Russian mythology. The bath God Bannik, dwelling in a “filthy hut” - the bath - is also the object of special “direct divinations” at Yuletide, when the essence of sortilege is the direct contact with the spirit instead of applying regular mantic techniques. This unites images of Ce-shen and Bannik and gives way to deep intercultural generalizations.