THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Mount Pingfeng, first peak of the sixth central sequence, looks south over the Yi and Luo rivers: a bare hill without plants or water, all sand and stone. Here lives the god Jiaochong, human in shape but bearing two heads. The text names him master of all stinging insects, and calls the mountain itself the lodging-house of bees.
The prescribed rite is unusual. Worshippers offer a single rooster, pray over it to avert harm, and release it without killing: 'exorcise but do not slay.' Most mountain cults in the Shanhaijing demand buried victims and jades; this is one of the book's rare bloodless offerings. The logic is appeasement — to keep wasps and scorpions from stinging, one propitiates their two-headed lord.
Later commentators read Jiaochong as chief of the venomous swarms, and the passage stands among the earliest records in Chinese literature of a divinity connected with bees.
