IncenseJadeGrainSilkRice wineA written memorialThe first grain of the harvest
Invocation Approach
Tone
Civic solemn ancestral
Address
HuangdiThe Yellow EmperorXuanyuanAncestor of the Huaxia
Relationship
A descendant before the founding ancestor
Warning
He is a founder and founders are always also a claim
Resonance
Those in public life healers scholars of the classics those keeping an ancestral rite
Symbols
The nine cauldronsThe yellow dragonThe jade tabletThe medicine classicThe centreThe calendar
Mythology Summary
The Yellow Emperor is the first of the Five Emperors in Sima Qian's Shiji (c. 100 BCE), a culture hero who defeats Chiyou at Zhuolu with the help of the drought demon Ba and is credited with the calendar, writing, the compass chariot, silk through his wife Leizu, and medicine, since the Huangdi Neijing is put in his mouth in dialogue with Qibo. He is also a Daoist immortal: the Shiji has him cast nine cauldrons at Mount Jing and ascend to heaven on a dragon, and the four silk manuscripts found at Mawangdui in 1973, which scholars have called the Huangdi sijing, show a body of political and cosmological doctrine attached to his name. The modern ancestor cult at Huangling in Shaanxi, with the public sacrifice on the third day of the third lunar month, is a twentieth-century development, from the joint sacrifice by the Kuomintang and the Communists in 1937 to the official rites revived from 2004.
Modern Practice
The practice is civic and ancestral rather than ecstatic: incense, jade, grain, silk and wine at Huangling on the third day of the third month, a written memorial, and for practitioners the medical and calendrical traditions that carry his name. The request is for the continuity of a line or a work rather than for a personal boon.