The god of agriculture arrives in this record wearing borrowed fire. Werner's Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), in its chapter on the Ministry of Fire, pauses over "Shen Nung, the God of Agriculture," who "also adds to his other functions" the duties "appertaining to the God of Fire". The reason is a matter of imperial emblem: having succeeded the Emperor Fu Hsi on the throne, he took fire as "the emblem of his government" and so "came to be called Huo Ti," the "Fire-emperor". He "taught his subjects the use of fire for smelting metals" and for lamps, until a second fire-sign was added to his name and Huo Ti became Yen Ti, the "Blazing Emperor". The tiller of fields is glimpsed only inside the flame that overtook his other titles.

This is where the shelf runs thin. Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this address its number, gathered under "God of agriculture" a wide company — Irish and Roman witnesses, a Finno-Ugric and a Japanese one, and voices as distant as the Maori and Hawaii — and the record still files them all. But only the Chinese authority is wired to served text, and even it meets the god sidelong, in his fire aspect rather than at the plough; the rest wait unread.

One deep tradition and a ring of silent ones, and even the deep one hands us a harvest-god who happens to burn. When a people's lord of the grain is also its lord of fire, which did they honour first — the flame that clears the field, or the crop the cleared field yields?