The Emperor Who Cut Off Heaven from Earth

Zhuanxu is one of the legendary sage-emperors of high antiquity in Chinese tradition, counted among the Five Emperors held to have ruled in the golden dawn before the historical dynasties. Said to be a grandson or descendant of the Yellow Emperor and to have ruled from a capital in the east, he is remembered in the classical sources chiefly as a reformer of ritual and the calendar and as the ruler who is said to have separated Heaven from Earth, ordering that the free traffic between gods and humans be cut off, so that ordinary people could no longer ascend to the spirits, nor spirits descend at will, and communication with Heaven was reserved to appointed officials. This myth, preserved in early texts, is often read as reflecting the establishment of a controlled, official religion in place of unregulated shamanism. Like the other figures of the Five Emperors, Zhuanxu belongs to legendary rather than documented history and appears in later genealogies as an ancestor of ruling houses.