The Goddess of the North Star sits crowned upon a lotus and looks on the world with more eyes than a face should hold. In Werner's Myths & Legends of China (a 1922 compilation of Chinese myth), "Tou Mu, the Bushel Mother, or Goddess of the North Star" is the still centre round which the heavens wheel; the Taoists set her in the palace called "the Pivot of the Pole", and gave her the surrounding stars for a court. She "wears the Buddhist crown, is seated on a lotus throne", and has "three eyes, eighteen arms", her many hands filled with bow and spear, sword and flag, the disks of the sun and moon. She holds "the books of life and death", and those who would lengthen their days come to her shrine.

She is a borrowed divinity: the record names her "the Indian Maritchi", a foreign goddess taken up into the Chinese sky and made a star. Her nine sons rule from the neighbouring constellations, and two of them divide the whole traffic of mortal existence between them — one, dressed in red, rules birth; the other, "in white, rules death." A goddess of many eyes, then, keeps watch over both gates through which a life must pass.

Here the shelf is thin. Only this Chinese witness is wired to served text; the Greek Argos that Thompson files under Krappe, and the Hindu authorities Penzer and Keith, wait unread — so the motif's more famous many-eyed bodies stay dark. What we are left holding is a single image: three eyes above eighteen arms, a face built to miss nothing. Is a god given many eyes so as to see more of us, or so that we can never once step outside the god's sight?