Gu (poison)

Names

''Gu''

''Jincan''

Among the Miao on the fifth of the fifth month poisonous animals were put into a pot and allowed to devour each other, and they were called 'gold-silkworms'. The more people were killed by the ku, the richer the kus owner became. In our time the normal term for ku has been 'gold-silkworm'. These animals can make gold. It was typical for the gold-silkworm that people continued to feed this animal in the pot, that humans had to be sacrificed to it, that the animal kept the house clean and worked for its master like a brownie, but that it caused harm to its master if he did not provide proper sacrifices.

a gold caterpillar is a caterpillar with a gold colour, which is fed with silk from Shuh. Its ordure, put in food or drink, poisons those who take it, causing certain death. It can draw towards a man the possessions of such victims, and thus make him enormously rich. It is extremely difficult to get rid of it, for even water, fire, weapons or swords can do it no harm. Usually the owner for this purpose puts some gold or silver into a basket, places the caterpillar also therein, and throws the basket away in a corner of the street, where someone may pick it up and take it with him. He is then said to have given his gold caterpillar in marriage.

ashes of old flowered silk are a cure for poison of ku of insects or reptiles which eat such silk. His commentator adds, that those insects are coiled up like a finger-ring, and eat old red silk and flowered silk, just as caterpillars eat leaves; hence, considered in the light of the present day, those insects are gold caterpillars.

''Gu'' meanings

• Poisoning from an abdominal wug
• In ancient books, a type of artificially cultured poisonous wug
• Ghost of a person whose severed head was impaled on a stake
• Evil heat and noxious qi that harms humans
• Wug pest that eats grain.
• Sorcery that harms humans
• Seduce; tempt; confuse; mislead
• Affair; assignment
• over Xun 巽

The marquis of asked the help of a physician from , and the earl sent one to see him, who said, "The disease cannot be cured, according to the saying that when women are approached, the chamber disease becomes like insanity. It is not caused by Spirits nor by food; it is that delusion which has destroyed the mind. Your good minister will die; it is not the will of Heaven to preserve him." The marquis said, "May women not be approached?" The physician replied, "Intercourse with them must be regulated." … asked what he meant by ‘insanity’; and replied, “I mean that which is produced by the delusion and disorder of excessive sensual indulgence. Look at the character; – it is formed by the characters for a vessel and for insects. It is also used of grain which flies away. In the , a woman deluding a young man, wind throwing down a mountain, go by the same name : all these point to the same signification." pronounced him a good physician, gave him large gifts, and sent him back to .

Abdominal wug poisoning

Cultivated poisonous wug

Dismembered sorcerer's ghost

As the legal measures of individual dynasties demonstrate, administrative officials viewed ku as a reality, as late as the nineteenth century. The primary host was considered a criminal; a person guilty of the despicable act of preparing and administering ku poison was executed, occasionally with his entire family, in a gruesome manner. In addition to the obvious desire to punish severely criminal practices that could result in the death of the victim, it is possible that Confucian distaste for the accumulation of material goods, and above all for the resulting social mobility, contributed to this attitude. Indeed, the penalties of the use of ku poison appear to have been more severe than those for other forms of murder.

Heat miasma

In P‘o-yang one Chao Shen kept canine ku. Once, when he was called on by Ch‘en Ch‘en, six or seven big yellow dogs rushed out at this man, all at once barking at him. And when my paternal uncle, on coming home, had a meal with Chao Sheu’s wife, he spit blood, and was saved from death in the nick of time by a drink prepared from minced stalks of an orange-tree. Ku contains spectral beings or spectres, which change their spectral shapes into those of beings of various kinds, such as dogs or swine, insects or snakes, their victims thus never being able to know what are their real forms. When they are put into operation against people, those whom they hit or touch all perish. Tsiang Shi, the husband of my wife’s sister, had a hired work-man in employ, who fell sick and passed blood. The physician opined that he was stricken by ku, and secretly, without informing him of it, strewed some jang-ho root under his sleeping-mat. The patient then madly exclaimed: "The ku which devours me is ceasing to spread"; and then he cried: "It vanishes little by little." The present generations often make use of jang-ho root to conquer ku, and now and then it has a good effect. Some think it is ‘the efficacious herb’, mentioned in the Cheu li

The majority are diseased, and ku forms in their bloated bellies. There is a vulgar tradition of making ku from a concentration of the hundred kinds of crawling creatures, for the purpose of poisoning men. But probably it is the poisonous crawlers of that hot and humid land which produce it – not just the cruel and baleful nature of the householders beyond the mountain passes.

Wug pest

Thus the term ku also included the use of philtre-maggots by women desirous of exciting the lusts of men and attracting them into debauchery. And, evidently, ku was also used to destroy crops or food-stores, or, as the learned physician expressed it, to make the corn fly away, perhaps in the form of winged insects born therein; indeed, the character for ku is regularly used in literature to denote devastating grubs and insects, including internal parasites of the human body, which exercise a destructive influence like poison.

Sorcery

the possession of ku poison, like the casting of horoscopes, was cause for official suspicion and action: At that time many tyrannical office holders would orders robbers to bury ku or to leave prophecies in a man's household by night. Then, after the passage of a month, they would secretly confiscate it.

Seduce

We know that among many aborigines of the south women know how to prepare love charms which were effective even at a distance. In these reports it was almost invariably stated that the love charm had a fatal effect if the man, to whom the charm was directed, did not return to the woman at a specified time.

Affair

it is surely obvious that the maggots referred to are those which appeared in the flesh of animals sacrificed to the spirits of dead parents, who after their death were, for reasons of taboo, only known by the name of the day upon which they were born, being merely a fuller way of writing 'stem', 'day of the week'.

Hexagram 18

The Chinese character ku represents a bowl in whose contents worms are breeding. This means decay. It has come about because the gentle indifference in the lower trigram has come together with the rigid inertia of the upper, and the result is stagnation. Since this implies guilt, the conditions embody a demand for removal of the cause. Hence the meaning of the hexagram is not simply "what has been spoiled" but "work on what has been spoiled."

''Gu'' techniques

At present, ku is used primarily as a means of acquiring wealth; secondarily as a means of revenge. The method is to place poisonous snakes and insects together in a vessel until there is but one survivor, which is called the ku. The poison secured from this ku is administered to the victim, who becomes sick and dies. The ideas associated with ku vary, but the ku is generally regarded as a spirit, which secures the wealth of the victim for the sorcerer.

The essence of ku, then, was the magic charm that could be prepared out of the surviving animal in the pot. It could be used as a love charm with the object of forcing the loved male to come back to the woman. The ku could be used also as an evil magic with the object of obtaining subservient spirits. This was done by feeding it to unrelated persons who would either spit blood or whose stomachs would swell because of the food they had taken would become alive in their insides, and who would die as a result; similar to the gold-silkworms, their souls had to be servants of the owner of the ku.

In the province of Yung-yang, there was a family by the name of Liao. For several generations they manufactured ku, becoming rich from it. Later one of the family married, but they kept the secret from the bride. On one occasion, everyone went out except the bride, who was left in charge of the house. Suddenly she noticed a large cauldron in the house, and on opening it, perceived a big snake inside. She poured boiling water into the cauldron and killed the snake. When the rest of the family returned she told them what she had done, to their great alarm. Not long after, the entire family died of the plague.

Ku poison is not found generally among the people, but is used by the T'ung women. It is said that on the fifth day of the fifth month, they go to a mountain stream and spread new clothes and headgear on the ground, with a bowl of water beside them. The women dance and sing naked, inviting a visit from the King of Medicine. They wait until snakes, lizards, and poisonous insects come to bathe in the bowl. They pour the water out in a shadowy, dark place. Then they gather the fungus which grows there, which they make into a paste. They put this into goose-feather tubes and hide them in their hair. The heat of their bodies causes worms to generate, which resemble newly-hatched silk-worms. Thus ku is produced. It is often concealed in a warm, dark place in the kitchen. The newly made ku is not yet poisonous. It is used as a love potion, administered in food and drink and called "love-medicine." Gradually the ku becomes poisonous. As the poison develops, the woman's body itches until she has poisoned someone. If there is no other opportunity, she will poison even her husband or her sons. But she possesses antidotes. It is believed that those who produce ku themselves become ku after death. The ghosts of those who have died from the poison become their servants.

''Gu'' remedies

Prescription literature was filled with antidotes. All known Chinese conceptual systems of healing dealt with the ku phenomenon and developed therapeutic strategies that were in accord with their basic principles. The Buddhists recommended prayers and conjurations, thus utilizing the same methods as practitioners of demonic medicine. In pharmaceutical literature, drugs of a plant, animal, or mineral origin were described as effective against ku poisoning. Adherents of homeopathic magic recommended the taking of centipedes, since it was known that centipedes consume worms.

A patient hurt by ku gets cutting pains at his heart and belly as if some living thing is gnawing there; sometimes he has a discharge of blood through the mouth or the anus. If he is not forthwith medically treated, it devours his five viscera, which entails his death. To discover whether it is ku or not, let the patient spit into water; if the spittle sinks, it is ku; if it floats, it is not. The recipe for discovering the name of the owner of the ku poison is as follows: take the skin of a drum, burn it, a small piece at a time, pulverize the ashes, and let the patient drink them with water; he will then forthwith mention the name; then bid this owner forthwith to remove the ku, and the patient will recover immediately. Again place some jang-ho leaves secretly under the mattress of the patient; he will then of his own accord immediately mention the name of the owner of the ku

In general reptiles and insects, which are used to make ku, are cures for ku; therefore, if we know what ku is at work, we may remedy its effects. Against ku of snakes that of centipedes should be used, against ku of centipedes that of frogs, against ku of frogs that of snakes, and so on. Those varieties of ku, having the power of subduing each other, may also have a curative effect.

… can conceal its form, and seem to be a ghost or spirit, and make misfortune for men. But after all it is only a reptile ghost. If one of them has bitten a person to death, it will sometimes emerge from one of that man's apertures. Watch and wait to catch it and dry it in the warmth of the sun; then, when someone is afflicted by the ku, burn it to ashes and give him a dose of it. Being akin, to it, the one quite naturally subdues the other.

give ku derived from particularly venomous creatures to overcome that taken from less lethal creatures. Thus centipede ku could be overcome by frog ku; serpent ku would prevail over frog ku, and so on. There were also soberer, though almost as powerful remedies: asafetida, python bile, civet, and a white substance taken from cock's dung were all used. It is not certain what real maladies these repellent drugs, cured, or seemed to cure. Probably they ranged from the psychosomatic to the virus-born. Many oedematous conditions were called ku, and it has been plausibly suggested that some cases were caused by intestinal parasites. Others are attributable to fish poisons and arrow poisons concocted by the forest dwellers.

The most common way to get rid of the ku was to give it away as a present. The actions of a man in Chang-chou are rather uncommon. He found on the ground a package containing three large silver bars wrapped in silk and in addition a ku which looked like a frog ; in spite of the danger he took it; at night two large frogs appeared which he cooked and ate; on the next night more than ten smaller frogs appeared which he also ate up; and he continued consuming all frogs that kept appearing until the magic was cast off; in this fashion the man suffered no ill effects from the ku poison.