ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the notion of gui and its related religious traditions of ancient China. It provides a deeper exposition of the character gui from an etymological perspective. The chapter discusses how this character itself was invented and logically constructed, as well as how many written forms of it Chinese people employed at the very beginning of their civilization. It focuses on some selected ancient sources, i.e., oracle bone scripts, bronze inscriptions, bamboo texts, and silk manuscripts. Certainly the character gui can be found at various archeological sites. All these concrete and relevant texts, however fragmentary they might be, can get us closer to the original understanding of the concept of gui and the layers of meaning it might have acquired at different times. Linguistically speaking, a character like gui cannot stand alone, if a sort of communication needs to be carried out. The script gui is identified as wei which is in turn a phonetic loan character of gui.
