She is the oldest great goddess in the tradition, and she has had the strangest career.
In her first portrait, in the Shan Hai Jing, the Queen Mother of the West (西王母, Xiwangmu) is alarming: a being with the teeth of a tiger and the tail of a leopard, her wild hair bound with a jade crown, dwelling in a cave on the mountain’s edge, attended by three blue birds who bring her food. She commands the plagues and the punishments of heaven. She is not a queen so much as a force — the fierce goddess of the western wilderness, where the sun dies.
Then civilisation civilised her. Century by century, the wild goddess was dressed for court. She moved from her cave to a jade palace on Kunlun; she acquired an orchard of the peaches of immortality, which ripen once in three thousand years and make the eater deathless; she became the hostess of the Peach Banquet, to which all the gods and immortals are invited. The Han dynasty worshipped her in popular cults as the bestower of long life and the saviour from the end of the world. By the medieval period she had become the serene, magnificent mother-goddess of the whole pantheon — and had been given a husband, the King Father of the East, and in later popular religion she is effectively the Jade Emperor’s consort, the queen of heaven.
Her guest list is where she touches the stories. It is her peaches that the Monkey King will one day steal; it is her banquet the immortals attend; her blue birds carry messages between heaven and earth. When the Emperor Wu of Han, history’s most persistent seeker of immortality, was vouchsafed a visit from her, she gave him — with reservations about his character — a taste of the fruit and no more.
She matters to this library as the supreme example of the tradition’s long memory: a goddess who kept her throne through three thousand years of rewrites, from tiger-toothed plague-spirit to the serene keeper of deathlessness — the West’s own face of the one thing every emperor, alchemist and fox-spirit in these stories is ultimately after.