A disfigured scholar, mocked by his own emperor and driven to drown himself, is lifted from the waves by a sea-monster and set among the stars to preside over the fortunes of every candidate who sits an examination. This is the shape our one Chinese witness gives the star-god, and it comes from Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), where the scholars of the empire worship "the God of Literature, Wên Ch'ang Ti Chün" under the sign of "the star K'uei in the Great Bear".

The record tells it without ornament. A man "as famous for his literary skill as his facial deformities," a candidate "whose name was Chung K'uei," presents himself for the golden rose the emperor bestows by his own hand on the first academician — and at the sight of his repulsive face, "the Emperor refused the golden rose." Rejected, he "threw himself into the sea", where a "monster called _ao_" — the sea-creature — "raised him on its back"; from that drowning "K'uei ascended to Heaven and became arbiter of the destinies" of men of letters. The witness even keeps the phrase examiners still use of whoever comes out first, to "stand alone on the sea-monster's head." Reverence for the man hardened into reverence for a constellation: the demand grew, our witness says, for "concrete representation of this star-god", and the scholars lodged him among the four stars of the Dipper, the "Chariot of Heaven" that governs the whole sky.

Only the Chinese witness here is wired to served text; Gressmann's Die hellenistische Gestirnreligion (Leipzig 1925) — the Hellenistic religion of the stars — and the Indian authority behind this address wait unread on the shelf. So the star-god reaches us wearing a single face, the ugly examinee turned into a light in the north. What is it about the scholar the earth rejects that the sky seems bound to take up?