The provenance file on Xīwángmǔ
Provenance record 280 · Xīwángmǔ · one temple, fully accounted for.
Provenance
1. The attestation. 西王母 — "Western queen mother". On record: Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), Huainanzi, Han Shu (Book of Han), Journey to the West (Xiyouji).
2. The preserved evidence. i → ī (Long vowel); a → á (Stress on a) — absent from the ASCII form xiwangmu, present in the restoration, verifiable against the sources above.
3. The narrative record. The Fearsome Portrait — In the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the oldest surviving description, the Queen Mother is not a queen at all in the courtly sense. She has a tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail, her hair unbound beneath the shèng headdress, and she presides over plague and calamity from Mount Kūnlún. The Elixir for Hòuyì — It is the Queen Mother who holds the elixir of immortality, and it is she who grants it to Hòuyì, the archer who shot down the nine excess suns. The gift does not stay in his hands: it becomes Cháng'é's ascension to the moon.
4. The physical record. The Queen Mother's earliest textual portrait is in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, compiled from Warring States through Han materials (roughly 4th–1st centuries BCE), where she appears with tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail on Mount Kūnlún. Her great material flourishing is Han: bronze mirrors invoke her by name for blessing and long life, and tomb reliefs and murals — most famously the Wu Liang shrine of the 2nd century CE — show her enthroned in the west, increasingly paired with Dōngwánggōng in the east. The Book of Han preserves the documentary trace of her popular cult in the millenarian movement of 3 BCE, when her tallies passed through the commanderies. By the medieval period, Taoist scriptures and liturgical texts had raised her to the summit of the goddess hierarchy, the form in which she has been worshipped ever since.
5. The current holding. The temple at /sites/xiwangmu/, classified Tier 1. The restoration preserves more than the ASCII form can express — stress, length, or a letter the Latin keyboard lost — which places it, mechanically, in Tier-1.
6. The documented resonances. Biotech, Longevity & Life Sciences, Faith & Spiritual Organizations, Food & Hospitality — seats argued and weighted in the pattern atlas, read through the myths in this temple's Resonance File.
7. The primary sources. Tao Te Ching — the library this file answers to, open at the Sacred Texts collection.
8. The continuing record. The Queen Mother never retired from the heavens. In Taoist temples across Taiwan and the diaspora she is venerated still, often under the title Golden Mother of the Jasper Pool, and her birthday is kept with festival observance.
At a Glance
- Restored name: Xīwángmǔ
- ASCII form: xiwangmu
- Meaning: "Western queen mother"
- Domain of influence: Queen Mother of the West
- Pantheon: Taoist
- Classification: Tier 1
- Original script: 西王母
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 280 of 287
The File Continues
Read the founding dispatch for the name's full story, the Resonance File for the archetype at work — or the whole archive in one sitting.
Continue the series — previous file: Xiuhtēcuhtli (read it here) · next file: Xōlōtl (read it here).
The Restoration Files are written from the same canonical record as the temples themselves: the lexicon, the lore catalog, the pattern atlas, and the cited scholarly sources. If a file ever disagrees with its temple, the temple is right — tell us, and the file will be corrected.