I. Introduction:

Historical study tends to be more related to the past, to the elite groups, and to the textual. Field research tends to be more connected with the present, with the common people, and with the oral. If the two subjects can have a dialogue between each other, many, if not all, questions left by the previous chapters can be answered.(note.1)

In Chapter Four, I stated that, according to my field work, the Land God of some localities is represented by a stone and/or tree. This representation is also found in China as reported by some scholars (e.g. Bredon & Mitrophanom 1927:164; Burkhardt 1958b:52, 1958b:115, 1958c:29; Maspero 1981:6). However, what is interesting is that people seem not to distinguish the stone Land God (Chio Tho.-ti-kong) and the Stone God (Chio-thao-kong), namely, these two gods seem to be somewhat interchangeable.

For example, a black stone (#S42; see figure 44) is enshrined in a temple of the Land God.(note.2) A worshipper told me that it was the Stone God, while the custodian of this temple assured me that it was the Land God. He said that the stone was the original stone Land God that was enshrined by the pioneers when they arrived in this area. In addition, the case in Nantou City reported by Liu Zhiwan (1961:127) in Chapter Five is also similar.

Correspondingly, the Land God of some localities is represented by or considered as residing in a tree.(note.3) However, people sometimes confuse the tree Land God (Chhiu Tho.- ti-kong) with the Tree God (Tua-chhiu-kong) and thus these two deities are also somewhat interchangeable (cf. Liu Zhiwan 1961:163; Eberhard 1970:255f). For instance, when interviewing the believers residing around the Elderly Tree of Pak-li Rural- town (#T36; see figure 103), I asked them what deity the divine tree is. Some answered that the tree was the Land God, some replied that it was the tree Land God, some replied that it is the tree for the shrine of the Land God, while some just replied that it is the Tree God.(note.4)

Similarly, the tree representing the Tree God of Tun-ho Ward (#T14; see figure 79) was originally not worshipped as the Tree God but as the Land God. I was informed that when the pioneers of this locality started to cultivate this area, they built a humble stone altar and situated a statue of the Land God under the tree to sacrifice to the Land God. Gradually, the altar and the statue were covered by the trunk of the tree and became invisible. Nowadays, people still worship the tree and regard it as the Tree God. However, elderly residents who know the origin of the divine tree customarily sacrifice to the tree for the worship of the Land God.

In brief, the fact that the Land God is sometimes mixed up with the Stone God and the Tree God leads us to suspect that the three deities may have some connections. Unfortunately, the field research I have done for this thesis is not able on its own to answer this question. However, if the field research fails to give us indication of the connections, textual approaches would be worth attempting. In fact, textual data are often of great ethnographic value and some scholars do contribute a lot to the study of Chinese life by their studies of historical texts. The aim of the following sections is to apply the theories of the scholars whose studies are based on historical texts to answering the questions left by the field research.(note.5)

II. Bernhard Karlgren and Phallicism:

One of the most distinguished scholars on this subject is Bernhard Karlgren. Karlgren (1930:1-66), using ancient sources such as the oracle bones of He'nan area and bronzes of the Yin and Zhou Dynasties, has showed that the character ( ) which now means ancestor, was written without the later radical as ( ), and that this character on the oracle bones and bronzes has the form ( ) and, is, in fact, a plainly recognizable representation of a phallus and really a fertility cult (cf. Ling Shun-sheng 1959a:178; Fitzgerald 1961:45-50; Berkovits and others 1969:123). (note.6)

Actually, the recent works of paleographers of the ancient Chinese inscriptions on bronzes and oracle bones have shown that in ancient times the characters now found differentiated by "radicals" in the broad sense, were written without these additions, and therefore many words now definitely differentiated were anciently written with the same character (Fitzgerald 1961:47). The investigation by Karlgren serves as a good example.

In order to give more support to his phallic theory derived from the paleographic studies, Karlgren further asserts in the same paper that though the Chinese word "She" is nowadays written ( ) with the "radical" ( ), occurring in many religious characters, and ( ) "tu", the soil, the oldest form of the character "She" was simpler. It was identical with the symbol for "tu" soil, without any ( ) shi at the side. Then he points out that the character for soil "tu", originally written ( ), was in fact, a representation of the phallus (Karlgren 1930:17; cf. Fitzgerald 1961:129).

Karlgren's phallic theory is further furnished by the character mu ( ) "male animal", used as opposed to "female animal. The animal may be ox or sheep: and the element "tu", written ( ) (the "She" pole) is the essential part of the character, it indicates the male sex. Therefore, the sense is clear: the ( ) "ox" with the ( ) "penis". Here, then the "tu" "earth" pictogram, the essential part of the character, is surely a phallic symbol (Karlgren 1930:19-20; cf. Ling Shun-sheng 1959b:43).

Moreover, Karlgren (1930:9) mentions the theory fully proved by Chavannes that the "ancestral temple" ("zumiao" or "zongmiao") on the left (east) side of the king's or the feudal prince's palace, and the "gods of the Soil and the Grain" (altars of the Sheji), to the right (west) of it, were indissolubly connected." Then, he points out that:

... the technical term both for the ancestral tablet and for the pole of the she was chu ( ); then we are authorised to conclude that the symbols ( ) and ( ) are essentially the same, a pole forming a fecundity-fertility symbol: in the first case it is the ancestral tablet tsu, in the second the soil god "She", in both cases a strikingly phallic symbol (Karlgren 1930:18).

Finally, he quotes a sentence in an important classical book Mozi (5th c. BCE.) chapter 31 (Minggei). The sentence states: "that (the state) Yin has the zhu ( ) is just the same as that Qi has the Sheji, that Song has the Sanglin and that Chu has the Yunmeng". Sheji and Ji are the well-known "altars of soil and grain". Now, in feudal state Yen, the altar to the "She" was called zhu ( ), the very word and the very character which means "ancestor" (Karlgren 1930:19).(note.7)

As a result, he cites Granet's hypothesis and concludes that the two cults (ancestral cult and earth cult) are really the result of a division and specialization of one primary cult (Karlgren 1930:10; cf. Fitzgerald 1961:47; Eberhard 1971:366f).

The results attained by Karlgren are of considerable importance. On the one hand they furnish us with an interesting explanation of the origin of the ancestral tablet, which has played such a predominant part in Chinese culture through the ages. On the other hand, they throw a new searching light on a whole set of rites of paramount importance in ancient China, connecting still more closely than before the ancestral temple and the god of the soil. They suggest that phallicism has regularly had to do with the crops of the soil (fertility cult) (Karlgren 1930:9). Furthermore, the results show the Chinese world to have had the same sort of system of ideas and rites concerning fecundity and fertility as other parts of the World (Karlgren 1930:21).