Xi Wangmu
(2025)
Our journey leads us deep into the mythic heart of ancient China, to the shadowed heights of Mount Kunlun, where the air thins, the veil lifts, and Xi Wangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, reigns not only in light, but in shadow.
This illustration shows her in her primordial aspect: serene, yes but also vast, unknowable, and edged with danger. The cosmic egg in her arms is not only creation, but also dissolution; the elixir beside her grants not just life, but transformation that may unravel the self.
Before she was a gentle bestower of immortality, Xi Wangmu was a goddess of plague, chaos, and divine wrath. In the Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), she is described with tiger’s fangs and a leopard’s tail, surrounded by howling spirits and wild beasts. She ruled death as much as she did life, held sickness in one hand and transcendence in the other.
She is the divine feminine in its most untamed form, sovereign of thresholds, where form collapses and something greater begins. She is a darkness that nourishes like soil, a night that births stars. Her gifts are never given freely; they must be earned, often through ordeal, loss, or madness.
To stand before Xi Wangmu is to face the edge of all things, to let go of safety, comfort, and even identity. But for those who dare, she is not destruction, she is revelation. In her darkness lies the root of power, the truth that life and death are not opposites, but lovers.
She is not the absence of light. She is the womb of it.
