The Huaxia (proto-Chinese) of the Spring and Autumns and Warring States eras seem to have fallen into this latter group: while deer had made up a part of the diet of the early Chinese, this dropped off with sedentarisation, and by the mid first millennium BC the spread of cultivated land had left them sufficiently rare that kings were obliged to maintain dedicated hunting preserves. The inspiration for the Han dynasty drummer depicted above had probably encountered more deer in ritual contexts than in gastronomic ones.
Of course, the explanation could simply be that a person wishing to mark himself out as exceptional has won half the battle if he can get his hands on an impressive hat. However, there may be an alternative possibility. The branching structure of both antlers and feathers is reminiscent of the kind of entoptic phenomena associated with the trance state. These are visual effects produced by the physical qualities of the eye itself – floaters (shadow images of particles floating in the liquid behind the retina) are an example encountered by almost everyone. These visuals can be accentuated under various circumstances: during migraines, trances, or while taking psychotropic drugs, notably.
Of particular interest among these phenomena is the Purkinje Tree – an image of the blood vessels inside the eye.
It is possible that the adoption of headdresses made of naturally branching structures – antlers and feathers – began as an attempt on the part of the shamans themselves to represent the trance state. One sees something similar in (self-) portraits drawn under the influence of psychedelics today, which frequently show wavy and/or branching lines emerging from the head of the subject:
This would help to explain the association of deer – not an animal usually noted for its aquatic or politic qualities – with water and government in ancient China. The early wu (巫) shamans served as government advisors, with a particular interest in water matters – in the event of a prolonged drought, for instance, it was customary to burn a wu alive, presumably pour encourager les autres.
Thus, the story of Duke Zhuang becomes a lot more comprehensible if we see it not as description of a cryptid assisting in government, but rather of an official shaman in his regalia answering a question that mundane methods had failed to resolve. It is common in animist cultures to see a person taking on the disguise of particular animal as becoming that animal to a greater or lesser degree, thus the officials of the time would likely have seen nothing unusual in recording that “the zhi” settled the case, rather than whichever of their colleagues happened to be under the headdress.