Book excerpt: Over two millennia ago, in troubled times not unlike our own, a mysterious figure, distinguished by a pheasant feather in his cap, emerged with poetic visions of a future world of peace and justice. Like Laozi, Pheasant Cap (Héguanzî) understood the underlying unity in things and the power of Dao to make things happen. Facing the threat of conquest by the westerly state of Qin, he looked to a messiah-like figure, the Ninth Augustan, to inaugurate a new era according to the mandate of the god Grand Unity. Here for the first time, we get an insider’s view of early Daoism as it influenced philosophy, its ideas of an interlinked cosmos, cyclical time, and the perceived role of the northern Dipper (Plough) constellation. A rediscovered early Daoist cosmic philosophy, and the messianic Nine Augustans (Jiu-Huang) with their stars in the Northern Dipper, are in this epic bilingual translation.