Household Door Gods
(Mén Shén 门神)

Tale 1

Long ago in the reign of the mythical Yellow Emperor 黄帝 (period 01), atop Mount Dùshuò 度朔山 in the East China Sea, there grew an orchard of magical peach trees. (Some say a single very huge magical peach tree.) On top of each peach tree dwelt a giant cock. It was the crowing of this cock at dawn that woke the cocks in the villages of the human world and set each day in motion.

Some of the branches formed an archway and thousands of demons passed back and forth through it as they went about their business. But one day some especially destructive demons began chewing on the trees, and thus threatened to disturb the order of the world. So the Jade Emperor assigned two generals, SHÉN Tú 神荼 and YÙ Lěi 郁垒, to go to the Mount Dùshuò and destroy the demons.

Accordingly, Generals Shén Tú and Yù Lěi went to the mountain and stood guard, and when offending demons appeared the two loyal guards fed them to the mountain tigers.

It is said that when the Yellow Emperor learned of this, he declared that images of these generals should be painted on peach-wood tablets and placed on the doors of houses to keep any residual demons at bay.

From this it became the custom to erect pictures of the two ferocious generals and to paste them on the doors of houses each New Year to keep away demons over the year ahead. Sometimes, if people lacked the time or money to procure pictures, they would simply write the names of the generals on their doors, and this seemed to work too.

(General Yù’s name is written 郁 in simplified characters, but it was written 鬱 in traditional characters and was one of the most complex characters in the language, so it usually scared away schoolchildren and foreign students of Chinese as well.)

Today generals Shén Tú (on the left) and Yù Lěi (on the right) are simply referred to as door gods (ménshén 门神), but they are not the only door gods. The door gods found on the doors of temples and imperial government offices were different.

Tale 2

Long, long ago, there was a beautiful island called Shuòdù 朔度, blessed with all things that would make human life happy, and on that wonderful island there dwelt a race of peaceful and happy people of great virtue who pursued a life of picturesque simplicity and rusticity.

But to the northeast of Shuòdù there was another, ugly island called the City of Ten Thousand Demons (Wànguǐchéng 万鬼城). This heavily fortified and generally awful place was home to a dreadful race of vicious and quarrelsome people called Vile Demons (Èguǐ 恶鬼 — not to be confused with “hungry demons” èguǐ 饿鬼, who are pathetic and merit our compassion).

One day, entirely without provocation and motivated only be viciousness, the Vile Demons attacked the innocently defenseless people of Shuòdù and enslaved them.

In their captivity behind the high walls of the City of Ten Thousand Demons, the unjustly enslaved Shuòdù people suffered horribly and died in great numbers from starvation and beatings.

Just as the virtuous race of Shuòdù was about to perish utterly, two huge creatures emerged from the sea bearing peach-wood cudgels. They were brothers, and the senior brother was named Shéntú 神荼 and the junior one Yùlěi 郁垒 (= 鬱壘). They charged the wall of the City of Ten Thousand Demons and smashed a great hole in it with their mighty cudgels.

The Vile Demon king, hearing news of this, rode out to do battle, and the two brothers quickly killed him. Seeing this, all of the formerly wicked Vile Demons of the City of Ten Thousand Demons bowed before the strange brothers from the sea and begged for mercy.

The liberated people of Shuòdù were naturally reluctant to grant mercy to the repentant Vile Demons, but Shéntú and Yùlěi refused to permit the people of Shuòdù to persecute the people of the City of Ten Thousand Demons, and sent everybody home. However, they promised the people of Shuòdù protection from the Vile Demons, and even promised the people of Shuòdù that the lands of the north and the south would be opened for their settlement.

It was not long before Shéntú and Yùlěi vanished, but to ensure their continued protection, the people of Shuòdù took to putting pictures of them on the doors of their houses.

The virtuous people of Shuòdù were the ancestors of the modern Chinese, and to this day it is a Chinese custom to put pictures of Shéntú an Yùlěi on the doors of houses to keep Vile Demons at bay, just in case.

As time passed and the connection of door gods with these particular figures gradually faded, other figures sometimes replaced them on doors, sometimes famous heroes (like Yuè Fēi 岳飞 or Zhèng Chénggōng 郑成功) or even palace ladies famed for their beauty and unlikely to frighten away demons.

Linguistic Notes:

• Shéntú 神荼 literally means “bitter spirit herb” and Yùlěi 郁垒 means “gloomy rampart.” It is unlikely that these literal translations should be taken into account despite the antiquity of the names, but they certainly seem appropriate monikers for frightening generals.
• The names are quite old and probably writing them as Shéntú and Yùlěi is more accurate than assuming they involve surnames such as modern characters would have. However, both Shén and Yù do occasionally get used as surnames, and the cultural pressure is extremely strong in such cases to understand them as such, even in early usage. In the first tale I have rendered them as surnames, in the second as given names, but the decision was more or less arbitrary. The Chinese remains equally ambiguous in both stories.
• In Taiwan, these characters have official Mandarin pronunciations Shén Shū and Yù Lǜ when used in these names.
• The syllable Lěi is written 磊 (“stony”) rather than 垒 (“rampart”) by some authors.