Lei Gong's thunderbolts belonged, in Song dynasty Daoism, to a technology as much as to a myth. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the rise of Daoist ritual movements, particularly the Shenxiao, or Divine Empyrean, tradition associated with the priest Lin Lingsu and patronized for a time by the Huizong emperor, that systematized leifa, thunder ritual, into an elaborate practical discipline: ordained priests, through visualization, talismans and prescribed gesture, claimed to command the same thunder powers Lei Gong wielded in popular belief, directing them to exorcise malevolent spirits, cure illness or compel rain, effectively deputizing the thunder god's punitive authority into the hands of a trained human ritualist.
Thunder ritual manuals from this period, later gathered into the Daoist canon, describe hierarchies of thunder generals and thunder marshals under Lei Gong's nominal command, treated by priests as forces to be respectfully petitioned and directed rather than simply feared. The tradition folded the popular image of a beaked, drum beating enforcer of hidden crimes into a formal liturgical structure, giving institutional Daoism its own claimed access to the very punishing power that ordinary households could only hope not to attract.