Taotie

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The taotie (饕餮 Pinyin: Tāotiè, Wade-Giles: t'ao t'ieh), known as Totetsu in Japanese, is a motif commonly found on ritual bronze vessels from the Shang and Zhou Dynasty. The design typically consists of a zoomorphic mask.

In Chinese mythology, one of the Nine Dragon Children (龍生九子) is named Taotie, possibly a derivative of the earlier motif. This creature is also known as the Totetsu in Japanese mythology.

According to Lu’s Spring and Autumn Annals: Prophecy, ‘The taotie on Zhou bronzes has a head but no body. When it eats people, it does not swallow them, but harms them.’* It is hard to explain what is implied in this, as so many myths concerning the taotie have been lost, but the indication that it eats people accords fully with its cruel, fearful countenance. To alien clans and tribes, it symbolized fear and force; to its own clan or tribe, it was a symbol of protection. This religious concept, this dual nature, was crystallized in its strange, hideous features. What appears so savage today had a historical, rational quality in its time. It is for precisely this reason that the savage old myths and legends, the tales of barbarism, and the crude, fierce, and terrifying works of art of ancient clans possessed a remarkable aesthetic appeal. As it was with Homer’s epic poems and African masks, so it was with the taotie, in whose hideous features was concentrated a deep-seated historic force. It is because of this irresistible historic force that the mystery and terror of the taotie became the beautiful—the exalted."

• footnote by Li Zehou: "Some scholars consider that the meaning of taotie is not ‘eating people’ but making a mysterious communication between people and Heaven (gods)."

excerpt from The Path of Beauty: A Study of Chinese Aesthetics by Li Zehou, translated by Gong Lizeng.New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. pages 30-31.