Deity · Chinese · c. 300 BCE
Xiwangmu
Also called Queen Mother of the West, Hsi Wang Mu
The Chinese goddess who begins as a tiger-toothed sender of plagues in the Classic of Mountains and Seas and ends as the serene keeper of the peaches of immortality — a demotion running backwards.
Well sourced
Almost every figure on this site travels one way: a god becomes a demon. She goes the other, and in documented stages. The oldest text gives her the teeth of a tiger, a leopard's tail, wild hair and charge of the calamities and the five punishments. By the Han she presides over the western paradise and the elixir; by the Tang she is a court lady with attendants. Nothing in the record explains the change and the corpus does not invent a reason for it. What the case is worth is as a control: the direction of travel in this compendium is a fact about the traditions it studies, not a law of religion.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
Mount Kunlun, in the west, from the Shanhaijing onward
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- Rank
- Queen Mother of the West
- Pantheon
- Chinese
- Order
- Chinese pantheon
- Base of operations
- Mount Kunlun, in the west, from the Shanhaijing onward
- Era
- c. 300 BCE
- Traditions
- Chinese
Traits
- Domain
- Plague and punishment in the earliest texts; immortality in the later ones
- Traditional form
- Tiger's teeth, a leopard's tail and dishevelled hair in the Shanhaijing; a court lady by the Han
Stats
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to Xiwangmu, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
- transformation1
- malefic1
- material1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Xiwangmu, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts, all inside a single century
Where the texts differ
- Rank: given as Of the jade mountain; Keeper of the elixir
Described with tiger's teeth, a leopard's tail and dishevelled hair, presiding over the calamities of heaven and the five punishments.
Holder of the drug of deathlessness, which is stolen from her and taken to the moon — the earliest form of the immortality role that later becomes her whole character.
Connections
What is it connected to?
No relationship to another figure in this corpus is recorded in the texts cited above. Where an edge exists here it is because a source states it, so an empty section means the sources are silent rather than that the connection is unknown.
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
Still a working cult. The Queen Mother of the West holds a substantial place in Daoist practice and in Chinese popular religion, with temples and a birthday festival, and her peaches of immortality are common knowledge through Journey to the West — where the Monkey King raids the orchard, which is the episode most people know her by. The tiger-toothed sender of plagues in the oldest text is not remembered at all, which makes her this corpus's clearest case of a reception that has replaced its own original.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Xiwangmu?
What rank is Xiwangmu?
How else is Xiwangmu spelled?
What is Xiwangmu said to do?
How old is Xiwangmu?
Nearest in the corpus
If Xiwangmu is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Gonggong
The Water Lord · Chinese
The Chinese water god who loses a fight and knocks down the pillar holding up the sky — which is why the heavens tilt one way, the rivers run the other, and Nüwa has repairs to make.
Nüwa
Creator Goddess · Chinese
She makes people from yellow earth and patches the broken sky with five-coloured stones. A creator whose defining act is repair.
Yanluo Wang
Judge of the Dead · Chinese
Chief judge of the Chinese underworld — a civil servant with a ledger, in a hell organised as a court system rather than a torture chamber.
The Ten Kings
Court of the Dead · Chinese
The Chinese court of the dead — ten magistrates who each hear a case at a fixed interval after death, with clerks, registers and a right of appeal, and Yanluo Wang sitting fifth.
Artemis
Mistress of Animals · Greek
Huntress and protector of the young, whose Ephesian cult statue looks nothing like her and whose temple gave the ancient world one of its most durable protective formulas.
Hades
Lord of the Underworld · Greek
Ruler of the dead by lot rather than by punishment — a god of the underworld who is not evil, a distinction Christian cosmology cannot express.
The books behind Xiwangmu
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas)
Anonymous · 4th c. BCE - 2nd c. CE · Classical Chinese
Read Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas) in full ↗Cover: Public domain · National Library of China · Wikimedia file page
The Huainanzi
Compiled under Liu An, King of Huainan · c. 139 BCE · Classical Chinese
Read The Huainanzi in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.