He Xiangu is the only woman in the fixed set of eight, and her presence there is not accidental. The group is arranged to cover the whole range of human condition, rank and age, and a set with no woman in it would have been incomplete by its own logic. Earlier and looser groupings of transcendents sometimes included other women who did not survive into the standard list, and she is the one who did.
Her cult is practical rather than doctrinal. She is petitioned in matters of the household and by unmarried women, and her image appears on domestic decoration far more than in monastic contexts. That is the ordinary shape of a folk cult: the theology sits in the Daoist canon and the actual practice happens at a household shrine on a birthday.
Her biography is best understood as a composite. At least four regions have claimed her as a local girl, in Guangdong, Hunan, Anhui and Zhejiang, each with its own site, its own version of the mica or the peach, and its own account of her disappearance, and the standard life is an amalgam of them assembled once the set of eight was fixed and a single story was needed. The atlas records the composite as the tradition holds it, and records that the local claims differ, which is a more honest description of how a figure like this comes into existence than any single village's version would be.