/jp/ - Otaku Culture

I am working on a very long overdue update on the Taoism section of the Archive. Okina-sama has a lot more connections to Taoism than just having a spellcard named after a type of Taoist ritual swords.

There's too much to unpack into a single post (and she is more than deserving of a whole article of her own...), but something I found personally really notable is that the Chinese believe that the Big Dipper also has a female deity associated with it. The male deity is of course no-one else than the supreme (ultimate, hidden, secret, etc too because he was thought traditionally too transcendent to be pictured). Shangdi himself is commonly associated with the North Star (a trinary system, though the Chinese would have lacked the telescopes to see the two "douji"...), but the Big Dipper is seen as his throne. Beyond that, it's associated with the creation of the world, control over lifeforce, a gateway to heaven, banishment of demons, and as a kind of timekeeper and compass. By the way, that "gate of life" mingmen, because the Chinese too thought as above, as below, is also in the human body as an acupuncture point and a very important one. It's located in the back, between the kidneys - a kind of backdoor, if you will.

Anyway, there is a female deity known as Doumu who is the "Mother of the Big Dipper" and the female personification of the supreme deity. She is believed to have two sons which are the two invisible stars of the Big Dipper - the Chinese believed it actually had nine stars, but two of them were somehow invisible. Beyond just being herself, she is associated with several very powerful figures from Chinese mythology. One of these is Jiutian Xuannu, the Mysterious Lady of the Nine Heavens. She has quite the resume, being a goddess of war, longevity, magic, I Ching (if Benebell Wen is to be believed) and interestingly enough, sex, as in for pleasure, none of that procreation stuff here.

That I Ching connection means nothing you (probably), but it means a lot to me. Jiutian Xuannu is something like Wen's patron deity, and things started happening as soon as I had merely ordered the book. A man had a jacket with the hexagram 30, same as the book's cover, on a train the day I ordered it. I drew numerous combinations of Lake, Mountain, Heaven, as a wink, not only to convey a message, but to tell me yes, we really are here. (There is a shrine called Hokuto Jinja after all between two Suwa shrines haha...) I have dreamed of the hexagrams. Had them appear in meditation. It really feels like the questline has resumed ever since I got it.

I thought it was a thing of it's own. It just might really be
>Her
whoever she really is (this idea might not even apply to them) all the way down.

Going past the memes and porn and actually playing the games was a completely life-changing experience.
>>48483718
Haha, yeah...funny joke...

Stealing Miko's sword!