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This book focuses on the remarkable political career of Wu Zhao (624–705), China's first and only female emperor better known as Wu Zetian or Empress Wu. In the tortuous half century of her reign, Wu Zhao faced daunting cultural obstacles and fierce opposition. Acutely aware of the breadth of resistance to her public political engagement, Wu Zhao capably deflected much of the virulent criticism. This book examines how Wu Zhao overcame these ponderous obstacles to become the sole female emperor in China's long historical pageant by developing and embracing a lineage of culturally revered female ancestors, goddesses, and paragons from different traditions, all of whom were closely associated with her person and her political power. It explains how Wu Zhao, by endorsing these various cults and drawing upon each of the “three faiths” (san jiao)—Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism—significantly bolstered her political authority, providing both a divine aura and tremendous normative charisma. The book explores the timing, nature, and purpose of Wu Zhao's connections to this eclectic assemblage of past influential women and female divinities.

This chapter examines how female symbols of the divine played out in the violent encounter between the Aztecs and their Spanish conquerors in Mexico in the sixteenth century. Spain sought to repress all the Aztec gods and goddesses in favor of a devotion to the Christian God the Father and his crucified son. Yet the very shock of this meeting and the mixture of the two peoples produced many apparitions of the central female symbol of Spanish Christianity, Mary, most notably in the apparition of Mary as Virgin of Guadalupe. This chapter also explores the extent to which this veneration of Guadalupe represents a syncretism of the Catholic Mary and a pre-Columbian veneration of a Mother Goddess, Tonantzin. It provides a case study of how the Catholic veneration of Mary, with its own roots in ancient Near Eastern goddess worship, was and continues to be a vehicle for the assimilation of goddess worship into Christianity from the conquest period to today.

This chapter examines the rationale behind Wu Zhao's decision not to enshrine a powerful Daoist transcendent, Wei Huacun, the Lady of the Southern Marchmount. Apotheosized as a Daoist deity, Wei Huacun was a transmitter and revealer of sacred texts. While Wu Zhao was certainly not averse to exalting Wei Huacun alongside a pantheon of other female divinities, she was keenly attuned to shifting ideological climes. At the very height of her campaign to define herself as a universal Buddhist monarch, Wu Zhao rejected an opportunity to link herself to this Daoist goddess, choosing to suppress rather than promote Lady Wei's cult. This chapter considers Wu Zhao's conflicted relationship with Wei Huacun.

This book has explored the role played by female divinities, dynastic mothers, and eminent women of different ideological backgrounds—complementing rather than replacing a time-honored congregation of male political ancestors—in the construction of Wu Zhao's political authority. With the help of her talented rhetoricians, Wu Zhao situated herself at the confluence of these ideological streams, a human vessel into which the collective energies and charisma of these eminent women and divinities might flow. Constructively and positively, this tour de force of culture heroes helped shape the contours of Chinese family, society, and religion. With elegant force and bedazzling panoply, Wu Zhao and her coterie of resourceful propagandists vividly rendered the collected women of her pantheon for all to witness—in text, symbol, image, and monument. The book concludes with a discussion of the extent, and the ways, Wu Zhao's pantheon of ancestresses helped in the establishment and maintenance of her reign during the Zhou dynasty.

This chapter focuses on particular patterns of mythic thought in the ancient cultures of the Near East, Egypt, and Greece in which goddesses play a central role in world renewal. It looks specifically at the figure of Innana/Ishtar of the Sumero-Akkadian traditions of the third and second millennia BCE and makes some comparisons with three other goddesses: Anat in Canaanite Ugaritic myth, Isis in Egypt, and Demeter in Greece. In addition to their myths about nature renewal, the first three have been reinterpreted in their historic forms in relationship to state formation and kingship. In the form in which their stories have come down to us, the first three goddesses express a construction of female divinity that sacralizes not only male but also royal or class-dominated societies. This chapter also examines the difficult question of the relationship of these powerful and enduring female divine figures to the status of women in the societies that fostered their myths and cults.

This chapter explores the role of the dynastic mother Jiang Yuan in Wu Zhao's pantheon of female divinities. Both before and after Wu Zhao, there is evidence that Jiang Yuan was widely recognized as the first or foremost ancestress. Jiang Yuan was one of the wives of Ku, one of the legendary Five Emperors of remote antiquity. She divinely birthed Hou Ji, the first ancestor of the Ji clan that ruled the Zhou. In the collective biographies of the wives of emperors contained in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, Jiang Yuan is portrayed as a redoubtable ancestress who played an essential role in the rise to power of the Zhou dynasty. Jiang Yuan rather than Hou Ji was the culture hero who elevated ancient China from a primitive to an agrarian society. Wu Zhao celebrated her connection with this early ancestress by inaugurating the Great Footprint era in 701 and by noting her kinship ties to Jiang Yuan and the Ji clan.