In Daoist religion the Northern Dipper is not a figure of speech but an object of cult. From the Han period onward, texts and liturgies address the seven stars, sometimes with two invisible attendants making nine, as the bureau that holds the registers of human life: the Dipper records the allotted span, and rites directed to it petition for errors in the ledger to be corrected and the span extended. A famous tale type makes the contrast explicit, pairing the South Dipper, who registers births, with the North Dipper, who registers deaths, and showing a young man winning years back by serving the two star lords at their chess game. Liturgical practice took several forms that the scholarly record describes openly: recitation of scriptures of the Northern Dipper, lamp rites laid out in the pattern of the seven stars, and the pacing of the Dipper, a ritual walk whose steps trace the asterism, attested from early medieval texts onward.
The Dipper Mother, Doumu, presides over the constellation in later Daoism and still receives offerings on her feast day in Chinese temple religion. The atlas records these facts about the cult and does not transmit its liturgies. One distinction matters for any reader of Chinese sources: Dou among the twenty eight lunar mansions is the Southern Dipper in Sagittarius, a different asterism entirely from Beidou.