Like Ishtar, who laments for her lost Tammuz, this goddess laments for her “Prince”.
“Dark is the grove wherein I dwell. No light of day reached it ever. The path thither is dangerous and difficult to climb. Alone I stand on hill-top,[23] while the clouds float beneath my feet, and all around is wrapped in gloom.”
This goddess is not only associated with ivy, the cassia tree, &c., but with the pine. “I shade myself”, she sings, “beneath the spreading pine.” The poem concludes:
“Now booms the thunder through the drizzling rain. The gibbons howl around me all the long night. The gale rushes fitfully through the whispering trees. And I am thinking of my Prince, but in vain; for I cannot lay my grief.”[24]
The goddess laments for her prince, as does Ishtar for Tammuz.
The mother-goddess is found also in the “Book of Odes” (The Shih King). She figures as the mother of the Hau-Ki and “the people of Kau” in the ode which begins as follows:
“The first birth of (our) people was from Kian Yuan. How did she give birth to our people? She had presented a pure offering and sacrificed, that her childlessness might be taken away. She then trod on a toe-print made by God, and was moved in the large place where she rested. She became pregnant; she dwelt retired; she gave birth to and nourished (a son), who was Hau-Ki.”[25]
Professor Giles refers to this birth-story “as an [[271]]instance in Chinese literature, which, in the absence of any known husband, comes near suggesting the much-vexed question of parthenogenesis”.[26]
Other Chinese references to miraculous conceptions, given below, emphasize how persistent in Chinese legend are the lingering memories of the ancient mother-goddess.
As was the case in Babylonia and Egypt, the rival biological theories of the god cult and the goddess cult were fused or existed side by side in ancient China.