River Spirit Who Grasps Two Snakes in the Yangtze Deeps
Mount Fufu bears gold above and azure orpiment below. Its resident god is Yu'er: a human figure with two snakes held about his body, who ranges the deep pools of the Yangtze and comes and goes wrapped in light.
Grasping or wearing snakes is the standard insignia of divinity in the Shanhaijing. The Rain Master's Consort of the overseas classics clutches a serpent in each hand, a green snake at her left ear and a red one at her right; Mount Dongting, in this same twelfth central sequence, teems with strange gods 'shaped like men, draped with snakes, gripping snakes in both hands.' Within that anonymous snake-handling crowd, Yu'er is one of the few with a name of his own.
Together with the two daughters of the supreme god at Dongting and the dragon-headed Jimeng of Mount Guang, he belongs to the family of water gods between the Yangtze, the Han and Lake Dongting, whose crossings are marked now by light, now by storm.
