The Chinese character for law - 法 (fa) - appears relatively easy to parse. It is composed of two sections: 氵(water) and 去 (to go or, in older texts, get rid of). Given the importance of large-scale irrigation projects in early China, it is unsurprising that enough regulation would be consecrated to the topic that water management and legislation would effectively be synonymous.
This interpretation is neat, obvious and wrong.
In fact 法 is an ancient simplification of 灋, in which the easy-to-write 去 has been substituted for 廌 (zhi), a character that is usually defined as referring to a “mythical creature that can distinguish right from wrong”. A little more digging reveals that the zhi was an herbivorous quadruped possessing a single horn or antler. Literary sources make comparisons with deer, oxen and goats, but the character in both its ancient and modern forms suggests something between a deer and a horse (鹿 and 馬 respectively). The water component remains the same, however, and its origin is a puzzling one.
According to the texts, the zhi would appear or be summoned to decide who was in the right in tricky legal judgments by indicating them with its horn/antlers. According to one story recounted by Han dynasty philologist Xu Shen, Duke Zhuang of Qi availed himself of the zhi’s services during the Spring and Autumn era in settling a case between two of his officers, Renli Guo and Zhongli Jiao[1]. Another Han dynasty work, the Lunheng, records that Gao Yao, Emperor Shun’s justice minister, used a zhi to decide penal cases, in which it indicated the guilty party by refusing to touch them.
The zhi was not the only deer-hybrid or quasi-deer associated with water and government, however. The most obvious example of the species is undoubtedly the dragon, which possessed deer antlers and was associated with both flowing water and sovereignty, but there are others. The pixiu (貔貅) has hooves, the body of a lion and either one or two antlers (depending on sex). According to legend one or more pixiu were tamed by the Yellow Emperor for assistance in his battle against the Flame Emperor. To summon a pixiu, the traditional offering is a glass of water. The fuzhu (夫诸), for its part, is a white deer with four antlers whose appearance foretells the failure of water management measures and the flooding of a city.
Other examples may only tick off two of the water-deer-government triad. The qilin (麒麟), has hooves, the body of a horse, ox or deer, and either one or two antlers, and its appearance foretells the birth or death of a sage. However its associations with water are minimal, mainly boiling down of a single story of dubious antiquity about the early Chinese culture hero Fuxi observing a qilin transform the water of the Yellow River from cloudy to clear. Conversely, the jueru (玃如) was said to be a deer with human hands that was found near the sources of the Qiangshui and Tushui Rivers (both apparently mythical), but which had no political implications.
However, the water-deer-government triad is not only found in cryptozoological and mythological contexts. Images of early Chinese shamans (and, indeed, early Chinese people in general) are rare, but a deer motif seems to run through the images that are available.
The Yanle Vase, for example, depicts scenes of daily life during the warring states period and shows women wearing antler headdresses taking part in what seems to be a ritual to favour silk production[2].
Multiple antlered-humanoid tomb guardian statues have been found dating to the same era[3].
Deer artefacts are relatively common in tombs of the time, and many seem likely to have served as stands for drums - the shamanic instrument par excellence. It is interesting to note that to this day the drums used in Taoist rituals are made of deer-skin[4].
One Han dynasty tomb also contained an image of a military drummer wearing an antler headdress - possibly a military shaman (a role attested to in Qin-era bamboo slip documents).
This raises an obvious question: why deer? The image of the deer-shaman is a familiar one across many cultures - from the Ariège sorcerer and the Starr Carr frontlets in Europe to Nicolaes Witsen’s illustrated travels in Siberia, from Yoeme deer dancers in New Mexico to San therianthropes. In some cases, the explanation is obvious: Siberian nomads and the San were heavily dependent upon deer/antelopes for their survival, so it was natural for them to do all they could to channel and placate deer spirits. On the other hand, the Yoeme were a population of sedentary farmers, more dependent upon beans, corn and squash than deer. Conversely, some shamanic cultures for whom deer hunting was an important source of meat seem to have preferred to use other forms of regalia. Mongolian shamans, for example, prefer feather headdresses to antlers.
The Huaxia (proto-Chinese) of the Spring and Autumns and Warring States eras seem to have fallen into this latter group: while deer had made up a part of the diet of the early Chinese, this dropped off with sedentarisation, and by the mid first millennium BC the spread of cultivated land had left them sufficiently rare that kings were obliged to maintain dedicated hunting preserves. The inspiration for the Han dynasty drummer depicted above had probably encountered more deer in ritual contexts than in gastronomic ones.
Of course, the explanation could simply be that a person wishing to mark himself out as exceptional has won half the battle if he can get his hands on an impressive hat. However, there may be an alternative possibility. The branching structure of both antlers and feathers is reminiscent of the kind of entoptic phenomena associated with the trance state. These are visual effects produced by the physical qualities of the eye itself - floaters (shadow images of particles floating in the liquid behind the retina) are an example encountered by almost everyone. These visuals can be accentuated under various circumstances: during migraines, trances, or while taking psychotropic drugs, notably.
Of particular interest among these phenomena is the Purkinje Tree - an image of the blood vessels inside the eye.
It is possible that the adoption of headdresses made of naturally branching structures - antlers and feathers - began as an attempt on the part of the shamans themselves to represent the trance state. One sees something similar in (self-) portraits drawn under the influence of psychedelics today, which frequently show wavy and/or branching lines emerging from the head of the subject:
This would help to explain the association of deer - not an animal usually noted for its aquatic or politic qualities - with water and government in ancient China. The early wu (巫) shamans served as government advisors, with a particular interest in water matters - in the event of a prolonged drought, for instance, it was customary to burn a wu alive, presumably pour encourager les autres.
Thus, the story of Duke Zhuang becomes a lot more comprehensible if we see it not as description of a cryptid assisting in government, but rather of an official shaman in his regalia answering a question that mundane methods had failed to resolve. It is common in animist cultures to see a person taking on the disguise of particular animal as becoming that animal to a greater or lesser degree, thus the officials of the time would likely have seen nothing unusual in recording that “the zhi” settled the case, rather than whichever of their colleagues happened to be under the headdress.
[1] Two Zhuangs served as Duke of Qi during the Spring and Autumn era, and Xu does not specify which.
[2] Ma Dayong, Yun ji feng chai :Zhongguo gu dai nü zi fa xing fa shi (Qi Lu shu she, 2009)
[3] Dematte, Paola. "Antler and tongue: new archaeological evidence in the study of the Chu tomb guardian." East and West 44, no. 2/4 (1994): 353-404.
[4] Thank you to Edward W. for pointing this out.