Legitimacy Beyond the Sacrificial Canon: Confucian Discursive Reinterpretation and the Cult of Bixia Yuanjun in Ming Shandong

Scholarship on Chinese popular religion has demonstrated the complex interactions between local cults and Confucian ritual norms and explored multiple historical pathways toward cult standardization or orthodoxification. Less attention, however, has been paid to how cults that remained outside the state sacrificial canon formed and sustained legitimacy through continuing historical interactions. Focusing on controversies surrounding the cult of Bixia Yuanjun 碧霞元君 in Ming Shandong, this article examines how different historical actors responded to debates over “illicit sacrifices.” It argues that, within the interpretive space provided by Confucian ritual norms, the cult could not acquire canon legitimacy because it remained outside the state sacrificial canon. Nevertheless, through the sustained religious practices and Confucian discursive reinterpretations of different historical actors, the cult continually established connections with certain normative principles and values shared within society, thereby forming and sustaining sociocultural legitimacy outside the state sacrificial canon.