The Goddesses of Metal and Fire: Artisanal Knowledge, Embodied Experience, and the Reframing of Smelters’ Cult in China, Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries

The goddesses of metal and fire were the patron deities of Chinese smelters. This article examines this artisans' cult through historical texts, ethnographic reports, and historical reconstruction of the smelting processes. It demonstrates that the cult was initially tied to the state-managed iron industry under Mongol rule (1271-1368), and later spread across geographical regions, encompassing diverse fire-related industries, including casting, bell making, tin smelting, and pottery. I argue that the cult constituted an integral part of artisans' material imaginary - a worldview that helped them comprehend the material transformation through fire, their bodily experience of extreme heat and danger, and the anxieties that were inherent to fire-related crafts. However, this widespread religious practice appears differently in historical texts, where Confucian scholars and state officials reframed the narratives about the goddesses, contributing to the cult's gradual disappearance in textual records. This study emphasises the limitations of conventional historical sources and advocates for combining historical reconstruction and folklore with archival research to recover marginalised forms of artisanal knowledge. Moreover, it argues that artisans' religious practices should not be separated from technological processes but rather treated as important components of artisanal knowledge systems.