Daoism Jian
 

Jian used for Daoism activity.
The signals on the blade have special meaning, like magic words. They look like Chinese characters, but different.

Hi Athena,
The corrosion on the blades has obscured most of the detail in these markings, any way you might employ your artwork talents :) and draw the figures as near as possible and post them? Also, could we see the swords in full?
These sound interesting and sure would like to get some discussion going, excellent topic!

Best regards,
Jim

Hi Jim,

Here are those characters that I can read.

Ahah Athena , I knew you were an artist!! :) Thank you for drawing those figures out. Now the search begins , and this is pretty ...uh, very, esoteric. I'll start looking....meanwhile, where is Philip???:)!!

All the best,
Jim

Hi Athena,
You might try doing a rubbing on the sections of the blade where it is hard to read the characters. It could possibly bring them up enough to read. Could you post a picture of the whole sword?


Robert

He is in Vietnam.

The whole blade.

Taoist charm
 

Hi
My level of chinese is not good enough to translate this prayer and my wife, that is Taiwanese, is not at home now to help me in the translation. Anyway, this kind of prayer/charm is usually difficult to translate for the persons that are not initiated.

In fact, these are magic prayers, from the taoist religion, also called the chinese popular religion. Living here in Taiwan, where this religion has not been affected by a communist regim, it is very easy to see its pious manifestations everywhere...even on my doorway.

My mother in law being very superstititous like most of the people here, we have some taoist charms in every corner of our home with one stuck on the top of our entrance door. You'll immediately see on the pics the similarity between the one on my entrance door, written on a paper, and the ones on the swords.

Basically, the purpose is always the same : get rid of the evil and protect the bearer. If I had not my mother in law to think about these things, I guess that i would have been damned already.

Best,
yuanzhumin

:D

Tangs
 

the tangs on those swords look kind of feeble.

Nice looking though. How much do you want for them ? :)

Looking at this again, I'd also point out that the zig-zag is probably related to the seven stars of the Big Dipper, which is also talismanic.

F

I would like to keep them in my collection. The steel is very good, intense forged. :)