The Shang dynasty of China (), which adhered to a polytheistic religion centered around worshipping ancestors, structured itself into key religious roles with the king acting as head. As recorded on Shang oracle bones, royal adherents were grouped into specialist teams such as diviners, spirit mediums and those who conducted sacrifices. Outside of the capital area, lineages of Shang royal origins also developed religious activities resembling those of the central government.
The involvement of shamans in the Shang religion is under debate as written records are not sufficient for a conclusive determination. A prominent theory proposed by K. C. Chang contends that actual shamans were employed by the Shang, but it has met various counterarguments. It is agreed that the spirit medium group referred to as Shang shamans played active roles in Shang religious traditions.
As Shang practices varied throughout its dynastic course, several roles within its religious structure experienced substantial changes. The Shang kings gradually consolidated their religious authority, and by the last decades of the Shang they had personally assumed the role of diviners. After the fall of Shang, the succeeding Zhou dynasty bestowed the state of Song upon Shang descendants, who continued the worship of their royal ancestors.
Royal adherents Oracle bones serve as the primary source for studies of Shang religion. They focused on the religious life of the king and the royal family. A typical ritual would feature many key roles; the sinologist David Keightley conjured such a ritual based on actual inscriptional records, frequently featuring the Shang kings along with religious specialists.
Shang kings and royal clan
The Shang king was at the center of all practitioners and acted as both the chief priest and the supreme intermediary between humans and spirits; he was sometimes referred to by modern studies as a 'thearch'. He ruled as a surrogate for the Shang supreme god throughout all four directions and exercised authority over all royal cult practices.
The Shang king communicated through means of divination, written on oracle bones. During a typical divination the king would usually give the final prognostications, which were then inscribed on oracle bones. He likely possessed the monopolized right to take part in divinations concerning state matters, and only he was allowed to read cracks on oracle bones, even when the charges were made by his diviners. The king could carry out the hosting ritual to connect with his ancestors, and he seemed to have exclusive rights to conduct this practice. He also facilitated lineage ancestor worship, with the highly religious king Wu Ding sending sacrificial materials to a Shang prince living outside of the capital. Wu Ding also seemed to be the organizer of his relatives' mortuary rituals, including that of his father Xiao Yi and his son Zu Ji.
Shang religion mostly concerned royal ancestors, and the High God Di was also probably a collective of many Shang ancestral spirits. The king's descendancy from the gods would then strengthen his legitimacy to rule. Besides their own ancestors, the kings also seemed to have incorporated tribal spirits into their pantheon in a move to gain support from tribal allies. Some among such spirits later featured in classical Chinese literature, such as Wang Hai and Kui. It was also a practice of the kings to conduct rituals to the Sun, which is interpreted as a way for them to control Shang familial branches.
Some close relatives of the Shang kings assumed roles as priests. A prominent figure among those was Fu Hao, a consort of Wu Ding recorded on inscriptions as host of sacrificial ceremonies. In one particular example, she presided over the offering of about 500 Qiang prisoners. Shang princes, each of whom headed a minor lineage, also participated in the king's ancestral sacrifices. Heirs to the throne were granted exclusive access to some ritual bronzes such as the ding, and the princes also occasionally appear as subjects of the king's divinations.
Divination staff
Shang diviners were referred to as duobu and were possibly directed by a supervisor; their organization exhibits traits of a bureaucracy. Oracle bone inscriptions record approximately 120 diviners whose names are known to modern academics. Shang diviners were members of lineages mentioned in oracle bone inscriptions, suggesting that such individuals did not have low status. The diviners also seemed to trace their origins to various regions with close connection to the ruling elite in Anyang; in fact, over 30 out of 120 diviners had names coinciding with places outside the capital area. The family grave of such a diviner in Anyang offers evidence that the person originated somewhere else, although he grew up in the capital area.
Shang divination staff usually conducted their practice in ancestral temples, but they could also proceed outside of the ritual center in the capitalsuch as on a huntand in those cases they tended to specify the place of divination. The staff prepared the bones, mainly scapulae and plastrons, and after that diviners applied heat to them. They then tried to determine spiritual responses from bone cracks caused by the heat. After their crack-reading and the king's prognostication, the staff inscribed a complete divination record on the bone, likely copying from a preliminary account on perishable materials.
Modern academics identify about ten major diviner groups mentioned in oracle bone inscriptions. Contemporary scholarship follow the 20th century Chinese academic Dong Zuobin's assignment of Shang diviners to five chronological phases:
+ Dong Zuobin's diviner periodization Period Kings Some contemporary diviners I Wu Ding Nán , , Zheng II Zu Geng, Zu Jia , , , , , III Lin Xin, Kang Ding , Péng IV Wu Yi, Wen Ding Lì V Di Yi, Di Xin
Currently, the very earliest inscriptions is identified to be that of the Shi group, and was probably the ancestor of later inscriptions. This group was active during the early reign of Wu Ding and included diviners Fu, Shi, Ye, and Shao. This diviner group functioned under the direct supervision of Wu Ding, who sometimes appeared as a diviner in its inscriptions. Calligraphy of these diviners comprises both large and small graph styles. Shi-group diviners were separated into factions and, also during Wu Ding's reign, developed into the Bin and Li diviner teams.
After the Shi diviner group, diviners were divided into two distinct branches, North and South, based on the location of their writing's remains. The North branch's Bin group was the most active Wu Ding-era group and remained functional during the reign of Zu Geng. Bin-group diviners were notable in that they employed a form of complementary divination charges, a practice rarely seen in other groups. This group was further composed of two subdivisions with different script content and calligraphy. Another prominent team active during Wu Ding's reign was the Li group, whose members often divined about the same topics as the Bin-group diviners despite their calligraphic distinctions. Diviners of the Li group were dated to the Wu Yi and Wen Ding reigns by Chen Mengjia and Dong Zuobin, but later studies suggested a much earlier datefrom Wu Ding to Zu Jia.
A group named Chu emerged during the last years of Wu Ding's reign and operated actively during the eras of his two sons, Zu Geng and Zu Jia. Regular diviners in this group include Chu, Da Ji, Xiong, Xi, Xian and several others. The Shang king was in charge of many of their divinations. Their calligraphy is considered very neat and distinctive, and their content reveals the first mentions of the regular five-ritual cycle that became the norm during later reigns. Chu-group diviners did not mention pre-Shang Jia mythological ancestors as much as earlier groups, and they also practiced a different bone-cracking method.
During the last reigns of the Shang, a major group named Huang arose, mostly featured diviners Huang, Pai and Li. It was a combination of the He group and another unnamed team called Wuming ('Unnamed'). Huang-group diviners are characterized by their small, vertical writing. They often wrote about sacrifices, war, and hunting; some of their longest inscriptions do not concern divination but rather documenting ceremonial events. Inscriptions by two diviners, Huang and Chu, have been used to infer a ritual schedule employed during the last reigns of the Shang.
The wu and shamanism
Numerous evidence seemingly suggests that shamans played a role in the Shang religion. Certain characteristics within the occupation of diviners suggest that they may also have acted as shamans. Since the Shang kings were sometimes recorded as diviners, they could be identified as shamans themselves, whose practice contributed to the institution of Shang thearchy. The hosting ritual () commonly carried out by the kings is a point of academic contention about shamanism in Shang religion. This ritual allowed the Shang king to connect with his ancestors, for example in this particular inscription:
Some scholars understand the hosting ritual to have featured the kings as ceremonial hosts uniquely equipped to "hear" the spiritual messages in religious events. Kwang-chih Chang and fellow proponents strongly endorse the theory that the ritual must have been shamanic, while others argue that the ritual did not involve the king immersed in ecstasy and spirit commingling and was thus non-shamanic. There was also a ritual of invocation whose graph depicts a figureassumed to be the Shang king himselfdressed with a ghost head mask and kneeling in front of an ancestral altar. They might utilize materials such as wine and grass bundles to accompany them in this trance-like act. Oracle bone inscriptions record instances in which the kings engaged in invocative ceremonies, as demonstrated by an example below:
Some assert that the kings desired to invoke the spirits through this, and since it was also their exclusive right to carry it out, the king was effectively a shaman-priest.
The Shang employed spirit mediums referred to in oracle bone inscriptions as wu (). Gilles Boileau identifies four possible interpretations of the wu, including a spirit, a sacrifice, a form of divination, or a living human being. The wu itself does not appear frequently on Shang inscriptions.
There exist several notable characteristics of the Shang wu: The gender of the wu is not determined. The character could denote both the name for a function and the name of a particular person or group of people. The wu occasionally presided over several divination rituals. The wu is seen as offering a sacrifice of appeasement, but it was not always the one chosen to carry out this activity, which the king and other staff also participated in. The wu follows (being brought, presumably, to Shang territory or court) the orders of other people; it is perhaps offered to the Shang as a tribute. After death, the wu was worshipped by the Shang together with regular spirits. Inducing the spirits to send down rain was the most important practice of the wu. If they failed to do this and harvest damage was imminent, the last resort was to sacrifice the wu themselves by burning.
The fact that the wu was offered to the Shang suggests a non-Shang origin of this figure. The sinologist Victor H. Mair examined the wu by looking at evidences from outside of China. He proposed a connection between the wu and the ancient Mesopotamian magus, whose ancient pronunciations resemble each other. Mair then suggested that since the magus were not shamans, the wu should be perceived as those who communicated with spirits via means of arts and ritual rather than shamanic practices. David Keightley also rejected the conflation of wu with shamans.
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