She appears first in the oracle bones of the Shang dynasty - dangerous, ambiguous, sending plague and blessing with equal authority. In the Shanhaijing she has tiger's teeth and a leopard's tail. By the Han dynasty she keeps the peaches of immortality in a jade palace at the summit of Kunlun, receives emperors, and holds the fate of the cosmos in her hands. In the Tang dynasty poets address her directly across the boundary between the human world and the divine. In Journey to the West she presides over the celestial peach banquet that sets the plot in motion. In the temples of contemporary Taiwan she is still worshipped, still petitioned, still present.

Who was she - and how did a figure first glimpsed in the bones of ancient diviners become the supreme female deity of the Daoist cosmos?

This book traces Xi Wangmu's identity across four thousand years of Chinese religious and cultural history - from the Shanhaijing's wilderness goddess to the Shangqing scriptures' cosmic sovereign to the folk tradition's maternal protector. At every stage the same fundamental claim persists - that the divine female stands at the center of the cosmic order's most vital and most dangerous power.

She is, in the end, the Immortal Mother - the figure who encompasses the shamanka and the sovereign, the dispenser of immortality and the sender of plague, the goddess addressed by emperors and petitioned by ordinary worshippers across four thousand years of unbroken tradition.

To read this book is to understand why Xi Wangmu has never been forgotten - and why she never will be.