>>40805882
>chang'e
>>40806079
>was most likely at some point a figurative device or one of toaisms crazy stories like riding a dragon to a floating island.
If memory serves, its smth like within certain Taoist sects and writings you can find practices meant to lead to a kind of spiritual immortality, but also historically some people tried to make that a physical immortality through various rituals and other measures and seemed to believe it'd work. Qin Shi Huang famously drank concoctions containing mercury hoping it would at the least extend his life, and did other practices suggested to him.
>there are so many shysters, shams, crooks, etc that have muddied the beliefs throughout history
In a sense it sounds more silly now than it was then though, the poisonous effects of mercury weren't known and people those thousands of years ago didn't really have the requisite knowledge that such a thing was definitely impossibly - after all, we think of it as impossible to be physically immortal because we have a decent understanding of how the body works built up over thousands of years and instilled concepts from our education that lead us to conclude its not possible (themselves built up over thousands of years), but without that we might also think its possible in some unknown way. Even nowadays people haven't given up on the idea of living forever and thats with a materialist philosophical framework being dominant.. I don't think its a case of scam artists or such. People can have mistaken beliefs and genuinely believe them, even if they look silly looking back on them.