Ma Gu - The Name

The Name

Ma Gu's name compounds two common Chinese words: ma "cannabis; hemp" and gu "aunt; maid".

Ma (the modern Chinese character 麻, which derives from a Zhou Dynasty bronze script ideograph, shows 林 "plants" drying in a 广 "shed; shack") originally meant "hemp, Cannabis sativa". Cannabis has been continuously cultivated in China since Neolithic times (Li 1974:437); for example, hemp cords were used to create the characteristic line designs on Yangshao culture pottery and the fibres were used to produce cloth prior to the introduction of cotton. Ma has extended meanings of "numbed; tingling" (e.g., mazui 麻醉 "anesthetic; narcotic"), "pockmarked; pitted" (mazi 麻子 "hemp seed; pockmark"), "sesame" (zhima 芝麻), and an uncommon Chinese surname.

Gu (姑, combining the 女 "woman" radical and a gu 古 "old" phonetic) is primarily used in female Chinese kinship terms for "father's sister" (e.g., gugu 姑姑), "husband's sister" (dagu 大姑 "elder sister-in-law"), and "husband's mother" (wenggu 翁姑 "husband's parents"). Gu can also mean "young woman, maiden, maid" (guniang 姑娘 "girl; daughter; prostitute"), and religious titles (daogu 道姑 "Daoist priestess", nigu 尼姑 "Buddhist nun").

Translating Ma Gu into English is problematic, depending upon whether her name is interpreted as a "maid", "priestess", or "goddess" of "hemp", "marijuana", or something else. Victor H. Mair (1990) proposed that Chinese wu (巫 "shaman"), pronounced *myag in Old Chinese, was a loanword from Old Persian *maguš "magician; magi", which is hypothetically comparable with Ma Gu.

Chinese Ma Gu (麻姑) is called Mago in Korean and Mako in Japanese. Mago (마고, 麻姑) is a cosmogonic goddess in Korean creation myths. Hwang (2004:1) calls her "the Great Goddess" and proposes "Magoism, the archaic gynocentric cultural matrix of East Asia, which derives from the worship of Mago as creatress, progenitress, and sovereign." According to the Budoji, Korean mytho-history began with the "Era of Mago." Japanese Mako (麻姑) is usually a literary reference to the Chinese story (below) about Ma Gu's long fingernails, for instance, Mako sōyō (麻姑掻痒 "Ma Gu scratches the itch") metaphorically means "things going like one imagined".