Butterfly Mother

Also Known As: Hmu Mais Bangx Mais Lief, “Mother Butterfly”, the two words bangx and lief both meaning butterfly; Chinese Hudie Mama, transcribed Meibang Meiliu
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Miao-Yao Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: She is the single ancestor from whom humans, gods, animals and weather all descend, having laid the twelve eggs that produced them.
Role in Mythos: Born from the heartwood of a felled sweet gum, she generates the whole living world in one clutch and is owed sacrifice by every creature in it.
Relation to Humans: The Hmu of southeast Guizhou count themselves her direct descendants through the first man, Jangx Vangb, which makes tigers and thunder their siblings rather than their enemies. Sickness in a household can be read as her calling in what she is owed, and the answer is the buffalo killed at the drum festival.

Above the Qingshui River there stood a sweet gum older than anyone’s reckoning, resin beading along the bark in the heat, roots holding a whole hillside in place. When it finally came down the axes went through the outer wood easily enough. Then they reached the heart, and out of the heart came a butterfly.

That is where the Hmu, the Miao of southeast Guizhou, begin the account of where everybody came from. Not with a god above the clouds but with a tree that refused to simply die. The felled sweet gum broke into parts and each part became something else. Fish slid into the pools. A great bird lifted out of the branches. And from the trunk and the heartwood came the two halves of one name, which the song states as flatly as an inventory: the trunk gave birth to Mais Bangx, the heart gave birth to Mais Lief. Mais is mother. Bangx and lief are both words for butterfly. What the tree produced was Butterfly Mother, said twice over for the rhythm of the singing.

She had no interest in ruling anything. What she did was court. On the water she met a bubble and the two of them traded songs the way young Miao still do at festivals, back and forth, teasing, each testing what the other knew and neither conceding. Out of that came twelve eggs.

Then the difficulty. She could not hatch them. Twelve eggs are a great deal of egg for a butterfly, and the clutch went to the bird that had come out of the same tree, the Ji Yu, which settled over them with its breast feathers spread. Accounts disagree about how long it sat. Some say twelve days and twelve nights. Others say it brought out one egg a year for twelve years, which is a slower and stranger picture, a bird growing old on a nest while the world waits to be populated. Either way the shells sweated under the down and the smell of warm damp feathers filled the hollow, and for a long stretch nothing whatever happened in the world except that.

What came out was everything. Jangx Vangb, the first man, and his sister. Thunder. The Dragon. The Tiger, the Buffalo, the Elephant, the Snake, the Centipede. This is the load-bearing claim of the entire cycle and it is worth stating without decoration: in these songs a person and a tiger and a thunderclap are siblings, hatched from the same clutch, owed the same courtesies. Jangx Vangb goes on to plough the earth and to survive the great flood with his sister inside a floating calabash, and their marriage produces a ball of flesh from which the peoples of the region are cut. The genealogy runs unbroken from the tree to the villages, and the singers can recite the whole of it.

The buffalo is where it turns. In the version told around the Qingshui, one egg would not open, and Butterfly Mother called down a storm to crack it, which released the buffalo but denied him the thing his brothers and sisters had, the warmth of being brooded into life. He never forgave her. She died of the grief of it. The buffalo then refused to pull a plough or help raise a crop, and the eleven remaining siblings combined and killed him. From that killing comes the sacrifice: buffalo offered back to the mother the buffalo had wounded, at the Guzang festival, when the great drums cut from sweet gum and maple are lifted out of storage. The drums are where the ancestors are held. They are buried and raised again at long intervals, roughly once in a dozen years, and the accounts differ on whether the proper span is twelve or thirteen.

Her powers are not the kind that get demonstrated in a fight. She does not throw weather or hold a mountain. Her power is descent, and it works as a permanent claim: everything alive owes her, and the debt does not lapse. A child who will not thrive, a household that keeps falling ill, can be read as the mother asking for what is hers, and the answer is meat and drum and song rather than medicine. The claim is why she is stitched onto things. On the baby carriers made at Shidong on the Qingshui, sewn by women before marriage and given to an infant at birth, she appears sometimes as a plain butterfly and sometimes with a human face set between the wings. The picture most people carry of her comes from the needlework. The songs themselves are content to say butterfly and move on.

Her limits are unusually frank for a creator. She cannot hatch what she lays and has to hand the future of the world to a bird. She can be killed by a grudge. And she is local in a way the English label disguises: Miao is a state ethnic classification covering peoples spread across several Chinese provinces and into Southeast Asia, many of whom do not sing these songs at all. Butterfly Mother belongs to a specific drainage, a specific dialect, a specific set of villages.

She also has no ancient manuscript behind her, because until the twentieth century the language had no writing. Everything in print is a collection. Jin Dan gathered the songs around Taijiang in the 1950s; the papers nearly went in the Cultural Revolution and were kept safe by the linguist Ma Xueliang; the scholarly bilingual Hxak Hmub appeared in 1983, after a looser Miaozu guge in 1979, and Mark Bender’s English translation followed in 2006. Jin Dan was careful to say that no standard version exists and none can, because the singing is a contest between two pairs of singers who interrupt the narrative “bone” with improvised “flowers” designed to distract the other side. The text is a snapshot of an argument.

In 2006 the ancient songs went onto China’s first national list of intangible cultural heritage, entered by Taijiang and Huangping counties in Guizhou. The government’s own account of the listing notes that in Taijiang, out of some thirty thousand Miao, fewer than two hundred people can sing portions of the cycle and only a handful can sing it through, most of them elderly. The drum festival, meanwhile, has been trimmed and rescheduled for visitors who arrive by coach.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Butterfly Mother in Miao mythology?

Butterfly Mother, called Mais Bangx Mais Lief in Hmu, is the ancestral creator of the Miao of southeast Guizhou. She was born from the heartwood of a felled sweet gum tree, courted a bubble of water, and laid twelve eggs that produced humans, animals and gods alike. The Miao trace their descent from her through the first man, Jangx Vangb.

What hatched from the Butterfly Mother’s twelve eggs?

The twelve eggs produced Jangx Vangb and his sister, the first humans, along with Thunder, the Dragon, the Tiger, the Buffalo, the Elephant, the Snake and the Centipede. Butterfly Mother could not hatch them herself, so a great bird called the Ji Yu brooded the clutch. Sources disagree on how long it took, giving either twelve days and nights or one egg a year for twelve years.

Why do the Miao sacrifice buffalo at the Guzang festival?

The Guzang or drum festival answers a debt owed to Butterfly Mother. In the Guizhou telling, the buffalo’s egg had to be cracked open by a storm rather than brooded, and he resented her for it until she died of grief; his eleven siblings then killed him. Buffalo are offered back to her at intervals of roughly twelve or thirteen years, when the ancestral drums cut from sweet gum and maple are raised.

What does the Butterfly Mother look like?

The sung tradition describes her only as a butterfly emerging from the heart of the tree. The familiar image of a butterfly with a human face belongs to Miao embroidery rather than to the songs, and appears most often on the baby carriers made at Shidong on the Qingshui River, where the motif is stitched to keep an infant safe.

Are the Butterfly Mother songs ancient written texts?

No. The Hmu language had no writing until the twentieth century, so every printed version is a modern collection of an oral performance. Jin Dan recorded the songs around Taijiang in the 1950s and published them with Ma Xueliang as Hxak Hmub in 1983, and Mark Bender translated the cycle into English in 2006. Jin Dan emphasised that no standard version can exist, because the epics are sung competitively and improvised in performance.