Wu (shaman)
shaman in Chinese folk religion
Wu (Chinese: 巫; pinyin: wū; Wade–Giles: wu) is a Chinese term translating to "shaman" or "sorcerer", originally the practitioners of Chinese shamanism or "Wuism" (巫教 wū jiào).
Terminology
The glyph ancestral to modern 巫 is first recorded in bronze script, where it could refer to shamans or sorcerers of either sex. Modern Mandarin wu (Cantonese mouh) continues a Middle Chinese mju or mjo. The Old Chinese reconstruction is uncertain, given as *mywo or as *myag, the presence of a final velar -g or -ɣ in Old Chinese being uncertain.
By the late Zhou dynasty (4th to 3rd centuries BCE), wu referred mostly to female shamans or "sorceresses", while male sorcerers were named xi 覡 "male shaman; sorcerer", first attested in the Guoyu or Discourses of the States (4th century BCE). Other sex-differentiated shaman names include nanwu 男巫 for "male shaman; sorcerer; wizard"; and nüwu 女巫, wunü 巫女, wupo 巫婆, and wuyu 巫嫗 for "female shaman; sorceress; witch".
Wu is used in compounds like wugu 巫蠱 "sorcery; cast harmful spells", wushen 巫神 or shenwu 神巫 (with shen "spirit; god") "wizard; sorcerer", and wuxian 巫仙 (with xian "immortal; alchemist") "immortal shaman".
The word tongji 童乩 (lit. "youth diviner") "shaman; spirit-medium" is a near-synonym of wu. Chinese uses phonetic transliteration to distinguish native wu from "Siberian shaman": saman 薩滿 or saman 薩蠻.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wu (shaman)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.