 Besides the wu, a quite different class of practitioners is known under the collective name of fangshi (“masters of the methods” or “of the recipes”). While they also operated within society as a whole, many fangshi were employed by rulers from the 4th century BCE onwards. Their fields of expertise included different cosmological and esoteric arts: astronomy and astrology; divination and hemerology; medicine and healing; alchemy; and sexual, breathing, and other longevity practices. In Anna Seidel’s felicitous definition (1983a: 294), the fangshi were people who had the “know-how”. In a broader perspective, it is important to note that several methods originally associated with the fangshi were later incorporated into Daoist practices. With this class of practitioners, we are in fact much closer to what Daoism would become in later times: as noted by John Lagerwey (1986: 282–83), not the “shaman” (with his or her ecstasies and trances), but the “diviner” (who fashions a “rational” world relying on images and emblems with precise meanings and functions) is the predecessor of the Daoist master and the Daoist priest.