聞分館君 Ask BunKanKun

太古蠶馬記

5 min read

Text ID
KR3l0138
Date
300–500
Dynasty
晉-劉宋

Tàigǔ cánmǎ jì 太古蠶馬記

Record of the Silkworm-and-Horse from Highest Antiquity by 佚名 (anonymous)

About the work

A short narrative fragment — a single myth-text — recording the foundational etiological myth of sericulture: a daughter, left alone with her father’s stallion while her father was away on a long journey, jokes that she will marry the horse if it brings her father back. The horse fetches the father, then refuses to eat and grows agitated whenever it sees the girl; the father slaughters the horse and stretches its hide in the courtyard; the hide, when stepped upon by the girl, suddenly rises, wraps her up, and flies away; days later they are found in a tree, transformed into the first silkworms spinning their cocoons on what was therefore named sāng 桑 (mulberry) — a punning etymology on sàng 喪 (mourning, loss). The myth ends with classical citations correlating the silkworm with the celestial Chén 辰 (horse-star), and quotations from the Cánshū 蠶書 and Zhōu lǐ 周禮 Xiàorén zhízhǎng 校人職掌 (“the prohibition of double-silkworm-rearing, lest it injure the horses”), establishing the ritual identity of cán (silkworm) and mǎ (horse).

Tiyao

Lost; no original 提要; fragments only.

Abstract

The Tàigǔ cánmǎ jì survives as a single narrative, essentially identical to the version preserved in KR3l0099 Sōushén jì 搜神記 juàn 14 (the “silkworm-horse maiden” myth, cánmǎ nǚ 蠶馬女). The relationship between the Tàigǔ cánmǎ jì and the Sōushén jì version is contested: (a) the Tàigǔ cánmǎ jì may be the Sōushén jì fragment circulated under an independent title; (b) it may be an independent zhìguài / zázhuàn drawing on the same source-tradition; (c) the Sōushén jì may itself have absorbed the Tàigǔ cánmǎ jì as one of its source-texts, the Sōushén jì’s 20-juàn form being a Míng reconstruction (cf. the entry on KR3l0099 Sōushén jì). The traditional view, going back to Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽 quotations, treats it as a Sōushén jì excerpt. Lǐ Jiànguó (Táng qián zhìguài xiǎoshuō shǐ) leans toward independent transmission via an Eastern-Jìn / LiúSòng source. The composition window is therefore broadly Eastern-Jìn to LiúSòng (c. 300–500); no author is identified.

The text is registered (under the alternative title Yuán cán 原蠶 or Cánmǎ 蠶馬) in some Sòng lèishū, but never as a standalone work in the bibliographic treatises of the standard histories. It survives in Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽 (juàn 825 cán 蠶, and juàn 893 mǎ 馬), in Yìwén lèijù 藝文類聚, and (most fully) in Tàipíng guǎngjì 太平廣記 juàn 479. The substantive content is essentially what survives in Sōushén jì juàn 14, expanded by the citations of Cánshū 蠶書 and Zhōu lǐ 周禮 with the zhèngzhù 鄭注 commentary — these classical glosses indicate that the text in its surviving form has been edited for inclusion in a lèishū or zhìguài anthology with antiquarian framing.

The myth itself is one of the most famous in the Chinese mythological tradition: the etiological story of sericulture and of the cultural domestication of women’s labour (the daughter / silkworm parallelism), with the punning etymology of sāng 桑 (mulberry tree) from sàng 喪 (mourning, loss) — a folk-etymology that remained productive throughout the literary tradition. The myth is the source of the cult of the silkworm goddess Cánmǎnǚ 蠶馬女 — also called Mǎtóu niáng 馬頭娘 (Horse-headed Maiden), worshipped at the Cánshén miào 蠶神廟 throughout the silk-producing regions from the Six Dynasties onwards. The myth was retold in late-imperial popular religious literature (the Tàiyīn dì cí 太陰諦祠 tradition) and is the source of the Mǎtóu niáng figure in SòngYuánMíng dramatic literature.

Translations and research

  • DeWoskin, Kenneth J., and J. I. Crump, Jr., trans. In Search of the Supernatural (Stanford, 1996). Translates the Sōushén jì parallel narrative.
  • Birrell, Anne. Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins, 1993). Treats the silkworm-horse myth in the context of Chinese etiological mythology.
  • Bodde, Derk. Festivals in Classical China. Princeton, 1975. Discusses the Cán-shén (silkworm-deity) cult and its mythological background.
  • Kuhn, Dieter. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5, part 9: Textile Technology: Spinning and Reeling (Cambridge, 1988). Treats the sericulture mythology, including the Tàigǔ cánmǎ tradition.
  • Lǐ Jiàn-guó 李劍國. Táng qián zhì-guài xiǎo-shuō shǐ 唐前志怪小說史 (Nán-kāi, 1984; rev. 2005), discussion of the cán-mǎ tradition.
  • Lǔ Xùn 魯迅, Gǔ xiǎo-shuō gōu-chén 古小說鉤沉, the Tàigǔ cánmǎ jì recovery.
  • Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §62 (early zhì-guài) and §44 (cult and ritual).

Other points of interest

The folk-etymology sāng 桑 ← sàng 喪 — though phonologically defensible (both Old Chinese saŋ / saŋs) — is a paronomastic gloss rather than a true etymology. Its function in the text is to ground the mulberry / silkworm complex in a moral narrative of transgression, sacrifice, and metamorphosis: the daughter’s verbal transgression (the rash promise to marry an animal) and the horse’s chthonic vengeance (the hide that swallows her) together produce the cultivated good of silk — a transformation that requires “loss” (sàng) at its origin. This narrative structure is one of the canonical Chinese myths of culture-genesis, and is regularly compared (e.g. by Sarah Allan, Anne Birrell) to Indo-European parallels of the wife-of-an-animal and the metamorphic-origin-of-craft. The classical-citation framing (Zhōu lǐ on the prohibition of yuáncán [double-silkworming, said to “injure the horses”]) firmly anchors the myth in the cánmǎ tóngqì 蠶馬同氣 (silkworm and horse share qì) cosmological doctrine.

Graph View