**7. Conclusions**

The cult of the Queen Mother is a very important phenomenon in the historical development of Chinese religion, and has long been a hot topic for discussion among scholars of Chinese religion and folk beliefs, but few of them study her cult in the Han era from a comparative perspective of literature and fine art. This paper fills the gap by closely comparing the appearance frequency and depiction of the goddess in the Han rhapsodies and Han stone carvings. The comparison of these two different forms of material finds that the image of the Queen Mother appears much more frequently in Han tomb stone reliefs than in Han rhapsodies. This suggests that Han rhapsody writers were less enthusiastic for the cult of the Queen Mother than Han stone carvers. Han rhapsodies were penned by members of the upper class, while Han stone reliefs were created by commoners, from which it follows that the cult of the Queen Mother was not confined to a society but rather spread across societies in the Han period. Our further examination of the Han rhapsodies and Han tomb pictorial stones shows that the former only describes the world of longevity and immortality that the Queen Mother resides in, whereas the latter both the immortal and the real world. The difference between the Han rhapsody and Han tomb art in their depiction of the Queen Mother and her surroundings suggests the difference in divine function or responsibility the goddess was entrusted with by people from different classes of society.

All this points to the fact that there existed two different Queen Mothers in the Han era: one worshipped by people from the upper class as a goddess of longevity and immortality as portrayed in Han rhapsodies; the other worshipped by the ordinary people as an omnipotent deity with divine power over both the immortal world and the mortal world as portrayed in Han tomb art.

**Author Contributions:** Data curation, S.W.; writing—original draft preparation, X.W.; writing— review and editing, X.W. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Data available in a publicly accessible repository.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank Xiaohuan Zhao of the University of Sydney, Yizhen Shi of Southeast University, and Qian Wang of Yangzhou University for their generous help with the writing of this paper.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
