Ge Hong

A Chinese wizard of the 3rd to the 4th century AD who specialized in communications with animals, and spells to manage both the animals and the messages passed to them. He was also the author of the Baopuzi or Book of the Master Embracing Simplicity, one of the most important reference works of the Taoist canon.

Some of his spells for handling animals survive, though (as usual) no one not a wizard should attempt them, as his attempts to transcribe the Speech into his local dialect of Chinese have been mangled and rendered useless by subsequent nonwizardly translators. One reads something like this:

"If you unexpectedly run into a tiger on the mountainside, promptly do the three-five spell and the tiger will leave at once. The three-five spell can be only transmitted orally -- you cannot write it with a brush. Another way is to simply imagine yourself as a vermilion bird, thirty foot long, sitting on the tiger's head. Because you block his qi, the tiger will leave at once."

(See also: Animal wizardry; China.)