Spells were very popular before Taoism appeared. Early incantations, as a message of congratulations, are symbols or forms of people's inner complaints in intense emotional activities. So "curse" and "wish" have the same meaning. From the beginning, "Zhu" was endowed with the dual functions of good and evil. Read a congratulatory letter and hope that a good god will come, which is its function of doing good; However, the purpose of the ancients seeking good God arrival also includes eliminating disasters. It takes fierce and imperative words to drive away the evil demon breath, so we call names and toast is a spell. For example, Shan Hai Jing and Bei Ye Jing recorded that Chi You dispatched troops to attack the Yellow Emperor, who ordered Ying Long to attack the wilderness of Jizhou. Ying Long is storing water, and Chiyou invited the rain god of Fengbo to have a strong wind and heavy rain. So the Yellow Emperor let the goddess Chiyou keep out the rain and killed Chiyou. Later, when Qi could not ascend to heaven, it stopped raining. In order to alleviate the drought, the Yellow Emperor asked Tian Zushu to chase Qi. The command said:
God travels north! Tear down the waterway first! Never cross the ditch! This preface is a kind of incantation with firm and powerful tone, and the sentence pattern is a combination of three words and four characters. Two or three sentences roughly rhyme and have poetic rhyme, which can be regarded as a budding incantation poem. With the frequent blessing activities and the popularity of poetry, mantras gradually developed in the direction of fixed rhythm and symmetrical sentence patterns, so there were four-character and five-character mantras. This sentence pattern has been used since Taoism. During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, as a unique magic method, spells were paid more and more attention by people in secret society. On the one hand, they inherit, on the other hand, they copy and innovate. With the rapid increase of Taoist scriptures, a large number of new spells have been produced. Judging from the Taoist scriptures of this period quoted in the Supreme Secret, almost all Taoist scriptures describing alchemy contain spells, and there are only 39 kinds of classic Dadong Yujing believed by the Shangqing school. Although these spells are not all poetic genres, it is certain that they contain a considerable number of poetic spells. Since the Wei and Jin Dynasties, the spell system with poetry as the genre has a great influence, mainly including the "mantra of the true classics", that is, the "mantra of the five true classics", which is constructed in five aspects: east, west, north and south; In addition, Huang San mantra and Shangqing mantra can almost be compared with Wen Zhen mantra. During the development of Taoism, incantation poems also influenced and infiltrated each other, and on the basis of these three systems, variations of incantation poems were produced.
In Taoist incantation poems, the name of God actually becomes the core image. Every god has his own story. When the story of god is condensed into an allusion by the spell creator, the artistic conception of spell poetry is born from this. At the same time, spell poems also attach great importance to the rendering of atmosphere, especially those used to invite immortals to kill evil spirits, which are often full of fighting atmosphere. For example, the incantation poems in the Taishang Cave mantra classic are decorated with various gods' weapons, and the landscape description of streamer lightning is as thrilling as the description of punitive fighting.