ABSTRACT
In these terms a late seventeenth-century encyclopedia begins its description of kitsune-tsukai , individuals who employ magical rituals to acquire foxes as familiars, using those creatures’ powers of illusion and spirit-possession to serve their own nefarious purposes. The earliest record of the term appears in the diary of the courtier Nakahara Yasutomi, who wrote in 1420 that the physician to the Shōgun, as well as the court’s chief in ‘yōshi diviner and exorcist were arrested and exiled on the charge that they had “made use of foxes” (kitsune o tsukau ; de Visser 1908:50-1). The text is not entirely clear about how or to what end these foxes were understood to have been employed, but recurring themes in subsequent literature are suggestive. Like the kitsune-mochi discussed in the previous chapter, kitsune-tsukai are commonly reported to use their foxes as agents of spiritual violence.1 Thus some fox-users were said to employ their vulpine minions to inflict possession-induced illnesses in their rivals, or to place their services up for hire as spiritual mercenaries, afflicting (and even killing) the enemies of their clients.2 Other accounts describe professional ritualists said to secretly employ foxes to cause the very incidents of spiritpossession that they were called upon to treat (de Visser 1908: 120). Indeed, it would seem likely that the fox-users described by Yasutomi were understood to be engaged in the latter kind of enterprise-the Shōgun’s consort is noted as the primary
target (rather than the Shōgun himself, a more likely target for an assassin), and those accused of the crime (a physician and an exorcist) were precisely the people likely to be called upon for help if she became ill, as well as those most likely to be rewarded upon her recovery. A prominent feature in the imagery of fox-using sorcery is the association between the use of foxes and religious illegitimacy. Like Jien’s accounts of fox trickery in the thirteenth-century Gukanshō (discussed in Chapter Three), the disgraceful designs of kitsune-tsukai on the Shōgun’s household is presented by Yasutomi as a sign that the Last Days of the Dharma (mappō ) are upon us. The disrepute of fox-using sorcery, however, depends not only on the malevolence of its purported practitioners (injuring others for their own benefit) but also on their treachery, fraudulently promoting their own careers by appearing to save the lives of people they had placed in harm’s way themselves. A key aspect of fox-using sorcery, in other words, lay in fox-users’ skill in religious misrepresentation, making use of their vulpine familiars in order to feign spiritual advancement. Not only do kitsunetsukai secretly collude with the possessing spirits they claim to exorcise, but they are also said to use those spirits as spies, collecting information that they then pass off as extra-sensory knowledge, of the sort usually associated with meditation or mediumship. Indeed, the Honchō shokkan presents such
feigned omniscience as the primary feature of fox-using sorcery:
When the sorcerer asks the fox about things he does not know, the fox’s form cannot be seen. When the sorcerer then miraculously speaks [about these matters], the people see it as the work of a god (NKZ 150:954).
