This talk argues that divine and mythical beasts were not decorative motifs but core translational operators in the French Jesuit Figurists’ early Qing re-making of the Yijing and related classics into a Christian-readable archive. Building on previously underexamined manuscript corpora—Yi yao 易鑰, Yi yin 易引, and Yi gao 易稿—the talk shows how Joachim Bouvet, Jean-François Foucquet, and Joseph Henri-Marie de Prémare deployed animal figures to construct a shared “antiquity–salvation” time-space, through which Christian notions of God, evil, and salvation could be negotiated within the Yijing and adjacent classical traditions.

Focusing on Bouvet’s and Prémare’s writings on hexagrams and mythic geography, I show how their figural hermeneutics treated beasts as evidence-bearing signs embedded in Chinese cosmology. Mystic figures such as 亢龍 (Kang Long, the Rebel Dragon), 陸吾 (Lu Wu, the Nine-Tailed Tiger), 滕蛇 (Teng She, the Soaring Snake), and 鬼斗 (Gui Dou, the Nine-Headed Bird) are reread as anticipatory signs of Satan and the drama of angelic rebellion, temptation, and the fall of humanity. At the same time, dragon imagery associated with the Qian 乾 hexagram is mobilized to craft a counter-figure: a divine, sage-like dragon that foreshadows Christ as the flying dragon, mediator, and savior.

By tracing these paired constructions of “good” and “evil” beasts, the paper argues that the Figurists did not merely borrow Chinese zoomorphic motifs; they reshaped the mythological bestiary into a moral and theological cartography. Mythical creatures become moving points within a shared symbolic field where biblical and Chinese cosmologies intersect. Bringing together translation studies, the history of religions, and myth criticism, the talk contends that Jesuit reimaginings of Chinese divine beasts are not ornamental curiosities but a crucial site where early modern global Christianity and Chinese classicism co-produced a new, hybrid grammar of the sacred and the demonic.