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2 The Appearance of Lie±u Ha ˙ nh’s Cult Alas! A prostitute with such moral behavior is unsurpassable even by the paragons of chastity in the past. —Liwa zhuan from Tang Song chuanqi xuan (Selected Chuanqi Tales of Tang and Song) In general, in Vietnam, female deities occupy a rather modest position compared to their male counterparts. For example, of the one thousand entries in Di Tı́ch Li ˙ ch S§ª Văn Hóa Viê ˙ t Nam (Historical and Cultural Vestiges of Vietnam), a recently compiled catalogue of cultural sites, only 250 sites are dedicated to female deities.1 Among these deities are historical figures, mainly war heroines or royalty, and they are usually referred to as Kingdom/National Mother (Quo½c Ma±u) or Royal Mother (V§ƒng Mãu). Others, usually legendary rather than historical, are famous for their supernatural powers and are simply called Mother (Ma±u) or Saint Mother (Thánh Ma±u), expressions that, lacking the stately register of kingdom/national or royal, are more endearing, giving respect to one who produces life. Lie±u Ha ˙ nh is one of the most prominent deities in Vietnamese popular religion and the most famous Mother in northern Vietnam. Sometimes she is also called princess (công chúa) or noble lady (bà chúa), which creates an aura of her earthly social recognition. Nguye±n Quang Lê, a modern northern scholar, has argued that Mother worship originated among northern Vietnamese and, like all other aspects of Vietnamese language and culture, subsequently spread to the central and southern parts of what is today the modern state of Vietnam.2 The relationship between the cult of Lie±u Ha ˙ nh and female deities originating in what is now central or southern Vietnam has been a topic of speculation among scholars. Nguye±n The½ Anh, a modern southern scholar working in Paris, has suggested that Lie±u Ha ˙ nh was an embodiment of the goddess Po Nagar, the most powerful female deity of the Cham people . He considers this to have been a result of the Vietnamese conquest of Champa, which extended over many generations and resulted in the absorption of aspects of Cham culture into Vietnamese culture. In this process of absorption, according to Nguye±n The½ Anh, Po Nagar’s name was Vietnamized to Thiên Y A Na, and later she entered the Vietnamese spiritual realm as Hâ ˙ u Tho¡ Phu Nhân (Imperial Lady of the Earth), achieving the highest status in the Vietnamese pantheon of spirits. But at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, severely restrictive and discriminatory measures were taken against the Chams, and Nguye±n The½ Anh surmises that these restrictions might well have diminished the greatness of the Hâ ˙ u Tho¡ Lady and reduced her to the modest condition of a simple guardian spirit. Yet, as proof of the vitality of her cult, she soon became embodied as a new Saint Mother (Thánh Ma±u), the princess Lie±u Ha ˙ nh.3 This is a plausible and interesting conjecture, but there is no evidence to demonstrate fluctuations in the status of the Hâ ˙ u Tho¡ Lady. Furthermore , the legends of Po Nagar or Thiên Y A Na or the Hâ ˙ u Tho¡ Lady do not have much in common with Lie±u Ha ˙ nh. The only common feature of these two cults is their gender and their popularity. It is most reasonable to attribute Lie±u Ha ˙ nh’s cult to the desire among women for a strong female deity. Such a cult could have been borrowed from Champa, or elsewhere , but it could also have arisen from among the Vietnamese, since mother figures are common to all cultures. Tra¼n Quo½c V§ƒ ˙ ng, a historian and ethnographer of Vietnam, has proposed to connect the appearance of Lie±u Ha ˙ nh’s cult to the importation of Christianity in the sixteenth century, reflecting the image of the Virgin Mary in a Vietnamese indigenous deity.4 While this is a stimulating suggestion , it is very unlikely that Christianity could play such a significant role in the establishment of Lie±u Ha ˙ nh’s cult in the sixteenth or seventeenth century since at that time the influence of European missionaries in Vietnam was insignificant, to say the least. However, since Lie±u Ha ˙ nh’s cult and Christianity spread at the same time in seventeenth-century northern Vietnam, the image of the Christian...

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