Verses of Chu, along with The Four Books and Five Classics (si shu wu jing四书五经) represent the foundation of Chinese literary canon. They were written in the Warring States period, however the origin of some of the poems date back to the semi-mythical Xia dynasty and some to even earlier periods of Chinese history. This paper examines the shamanistic elements in the second chapter of the anthology The Nine Songs. The paper firstly focuses on the difficult question of early Chinese shamanism, which has not been resolved to this date. In connection with this, the paper focuses on the two most important documents which contain the word wu巫, which is a semantic equivalent for a shaman. The texts are an important piece of evidence that prove that shamanism, as it was known in the early Chinese dynasties Shang商朝 and Zhou周朝, was bureaucratised very early on, as it is claimed by Thomas Michael. A more original form of shamanism was pre-served in the south of China, in the Chu state楚, where The Nine Songs were created based on ritualistic folk songs. The main part of this paper focuses on the analysis of sev-eral typical characteristics of shamanism, such as the ascension of the soul or the magical flight, trance, the obsession and the love relationship with an ally spirit or a deity. The consummation of a love relationship between a shaman and a deity in ritualistic songs can be depicted through a dance game or can be expressed in an actual sexual act, copula-tion.
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