Doumu

The Northern Dipper never sets below the horizon at the latitudes where Chinese court astronomy developed, circling the pole night after night while the rest of the sky wheels past it, and that permanence is most of the reason it became, in Daoist cosmology, the seat of the record keeping that determines how long a life will run. Doumu, the Mother of the Bushel, is identified as the source and ruler of the Dipper's nine stars, usually described as the seven visible stars of the familiar asterism plus two invisible attendant stars, and each star is believed to hold a portion of the register in which a person's allotted years, conduct and fortune are recorded and periodically revised.

Her iconography carries the theology directly: images typically give her several arms, sometimes several faces, holding the sun and moon as disks in two of her hands alongside a bow, a bell and other ritual implements, a multiplicity of form matching her rule over the nine stars she governs at once. Daoist liturgy addressed to her, still performed today, asks not for the abolition of fate but for its correction, an extension of allotted years or a repair of ill fortune already written into the register, framed as a plea to the keeper of the record rather than a demand against it. She is sometimes identified with, or placed alongside, the Buddhist goddess Marici, a convergence that reflects how thoroughly Daoist and Buddhist stellar cults absorbed each other's iconography across the medieval period, without either tradition treating the other's Doumu or Marici as simply identical to its own.