page_title: Magu (deity)
section_title: Name
hierarchical_section_title: Magu (deity) / Name
caption_attribution_description: English: Yangshao hemp-cordmarked Amphora, Banpo Phase 4800 BCE, Shaanxi. Photographed at the Musee GuimetFrançais&#160;: Bouteille en forme d'amphore à décor cordé. Chine du Nord, Shaanxi, Banpo. Culture de Yangshao, phase de Banpo, 4800 avant l'ère commune. Terre cuite rosée, montée au colombin. Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, Paris. Collection Christian Deydier, 1990 - MA 5856
context_page_description: Magu is a legendary Taoist xian associated with the elixir of life, and a symbolic protector of females in Chinese mythology. Stories in Chinese literature describe Magu as a beautiful young woman with long birdlike fingernails, while early myths associate her with caves. Magu xian shou is a popular motif in Chinese art.
context_section_description: Magu's name compounds two common Chinese words: ma "cannabis; hemp" and gu "aunt; maid".
  Ma—the modern Chinese character for which is 麻, deriving from a Zhou Dynasty bronze script ideograph that shows 林; 'plants' drying in a 广; 'shed; shack'—originally meant "hemp, Cannabis sativa". Cannabis has been continuously cultivated in China since Neolithic times (Li 1974, p. 437); for example, hemp cords were used to create the characteristic line designs on Yangshao culture pottery and the fibres were used to produce cloth prior to the introduction of cotton. Ma has extended meanings of "numbed; tingling" (e.g., 麻醉; mázuì; 'anesthetic; narcotic'), "pockmarked; pitted" (麻子; mázi; 'hemp seed; pockmark'), "sesame" (芝麻; zhīma), and an uncommon Chinese surname.
  Gu (姑, combining the 女 "woman" radical and a gu 古 "old" phonetic) is primarily used in female Chinese kinship terms for "father's sister" (e.g., gugu 姑姑), "husband's sister" (dagu 大姑 "elder sister-in-law"), and "husband's mother" (wenggu 翁姑 "husband's parents"). Gu can also mean "young woman, maiden, maid" (guniang 姑娘 "girl; daughter; prostitute"), and religious titles (daogu 道姑 "Daoist priestess", nigu 尼姑 "Buddhist nun").
  Translating Magu into English is problematic, depending upon whether her name is interpreted as a "maid", "priestess", or "goddess" of "hemp", "marijuana", or something else. Victor H. Mair (1990) proposed that Chinese wu (巫 "shaman"), pronounced *myag in Old Chinese, was a loanword from Old Persian *maguš "magician; magi", which is hypothetically comparable with Magu.
  Chinese Magu (麻姑) is called Mago in Korean and Mako in Japanese. Mago (마고, 麻姑) is a cosmogonic goddess in Korean creation myths. Hwang (2004, p. 1) calls her "the Great Goddess" and proposes "Magoism, the archaic gynocentric cultural matrix of East Asia, which derives from the worship of Mago as creatress, progenitress, and sovereign." According to the Budoji, Korean mytho-history began with the "Era of Mago." Japanese Mako (麻姑) is usually a literary reference to the Chinese story (below) about Magu's long fingernails, for instance, Mako sōyō (麻姑掻痒 "Magu scratches the itch") metaphorically means "things going like one imagined".
caption: Yangshao culture (ca. 4800 BCE) amphora with hemp cord design
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