The Cult of the Fox

Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China

Xiaofei Kang

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780231508223
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

For more than five centuries the shamanistic fox cult has attracted large portions of the Chinese population and appealed to a wide range of social classes. Deemed illicit by imperial rulers and clerics and officially banned by republican and communist leaders, the fox cult has managed to survive and flourish in individual homes and community shrines throughout northern China. In this new work, the first to examine the fox cult as a vibrant popular religion, Xiaofei Kang explores the manifold meanings of the fox spirit in Chinese society. Kang describes various cult practices, activities of worship, and the exorcising of fox spirits to reveal how the Chinese people constructed their cultural and social values outside the gaze of offical power and morality.

1

Foxes in Early Chinese Tradition

From the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, many commoners have worshipped fox deities (hushen). They offer sacrifices [to them] in their bedchambers, and the food and drink offered are the same as those [consumed by] humans. Those who offer sacrifices are not [limited to] one “host” [of the foxes]. At the time there was a proverb saying: “Without fox demons (humei), no village is complete.”¹

The fox worship witnessed here by the Tang scholar Zhang Zhuo (658–730) seems to have been deeply rooted in an age-old tradition spanning a thousand years of Chinese history, for this passage is found along with some eighty records of fox spirits dating from the Han (206 b.c.–220 a.d.) to the early Song (960–1279) in the tenth-century encyclopedic anthology, Taiping guangji (Extensive Records of the Taiping Reign). This chapter explores Chinese conceptions of foxes from ancient times to the Song. I first trace the mythical origin of the fox and its divinatory meanings in Chinese political culture and analyze popular beliefs in fox magic and the changing images of the fox in the legend of the Queen Mother of the West. Then I use the rich collection of Tang fox tales in the Taiping guangji to discuss the symbolic meanings of foxes in the specific cultural environment of late Tang society. Finally, I rely on official histories, Daoist texts, local gazetteers, and literati anecdotal writings to discuss fox exorcism and state and clerical efforts to suppress the fox cult. The complex and often contradictory representations of foxes in early periods have had a long-lasting impact on Chinese history.

THE DEMONIC DIVINITY

The Fox as Omen

The fox, among many other animals, was used as a symbol of premonition in ancient Chinese texts. Shanhaijing (The Classics of Mountains and Seas), which records numerous wild mountains, distant seas, exotic flora and fauna, and legendary creatures, introduces a number of records about foxes or foxlike animals whose appearance portends war and disaster. In particular, it mentions a nine-tailed fox in several places: “Three hundred li farther east is a mountain called Green Hill…. There is an animal that looks like a fox and has nine tails. Its voice sounds like a baby. It is man-eating. Whoever eats it will be immune to bewitching poisons.”²

In Han esoteric texts, the nine-tailed fox is not a man-eating beast, but rather an auspicious omen. It is said to have appeared when King Tang of the Shang dynasty (sixteenth to eleventh century b.c.) ascended the throne and when the “Eastern Barbarians” submitted themselves to the rule of King Wen. A white fox with nine tails also appeared to the legendary king, Yu the Great, when he turned thirty years old, as a divine indication of his forthcoming marriage that foretold the prosperity of his family and his momentous political achievements.³ The auspicious meanings of the nine-tailed fox are explained in Baihutong (The Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall), which records court discussions of Later Han (a.d. 25–220) Confucian scholars:

What is the Nine-tailed Fox? When a fox dies, it turns its head toward the hill [where it was born]; it does not forget its [place] of origin. It means that in comfort a man must never lose sight of calamities [impending]. Why must [this fox appear] with nine tails? When the nine concubines [of the King each] receive their proper place, his sons and grandsons will enjoy abundant peace. Why [is the emphasis laid] upon the tail? It is to indicate that his posterity shall be numerous.⁴

Here the fox is given moral meanings. According to Liji (The Book of Rites), the Confucian classic completed in the Former Han (206 b.c.–6 a.d.), the fox serves as a model of humaneness, for in facing home when it dies, it teaches human beings to always observe the rites as their spiritual home.⁵ The nine-tailed fox is further associated with the rule of sage kings and with imperial concubines. This stresses the importance of concubines for the continuation of the ancestral line and the need to have them properly managed by the emperor, both essential factors for the eternal peace and harmony of the dynasty. It also hints that concubines were a potential source of familial discord and national disaster.

The use of omens for political ends persisted during the Six Dynasties. Guo Pu (a.d. 276–324), a Jin-era annotator of Shanhaijing and a well-known diviner, wrote his famous eulogy on the nine-tailed fox:

An extraordinary beast on the Green Hill,

The fox of nine tails.

It manifests itself when the Way prevails,

And it appears with a book in its mouth:

It sends an auspicious omen to the Zhou [dynasty]

To promulgate a mystical talisman.⁶

Official historians of this period showed great enthusiasm in delineating correspondences between animal activities, natural phenomena, and the current political situation. The fox is connected to the sage kings of the idealized Zhou dynasty in these histories and acclaimed as a symbol of humane and wise rule. Foxes caught in the fields were intentionally taken as divine signs of the dynasty’s fate. Upon the final abolition of the Later Han and the official enthronement of the first emperor of Wei, an unusually large fox, red in color and surrounded by dozens of ordinary foxes, was reported found in the north of Zhencheng county (today’s Jiangsu province). The fox was identified as a nine-tailed fox, for its long, bushy tail had many branches. It was sent to the court, accompanied by a memorial of felicitation to the throne.⁷ Beginning in a.d. 478, when the ambitious Tuoba emperor Xiaowendi (471–499) initiated his grand plan of converting his people to Chinese ways of living and governing, auspicious foxes were reported in many different sectors of north China and presented to the court.⁸ The tradition continued into the Tang, especially during the reign of Taizong (627–648), after he had taken the throne by killing his two brothers and forcing his father to abdicate. Emperor Taizong ascended the throne in the eighth month of the ninth year of Wude (626). In the eleventh month of that year, a black fox was said to have appeared in Zhengzhou. In subsequent years, black and white foxes were sent to the court as tributes from many places.⁹ These records reinforce the connection between the fox as good omen and the prevalence of sagely rule and use the symbolic meanings of the fox either to consolidate newly established power or to pledge local loyalty.

Fox Magic: Metamorphosis, Possession, and Sexual Enchantment

In addition to its auspicious connotations in political texts, the fox was perceived as a spectral animal able to metamorphose and to bewitch people. The Han lexicographer Xu Shen (30–124) defined the fox as a “demonic beast (yaoshou), ridden by ghosts.”¹⁰ He suggests this role as an innate characteristic of the biological fox and an inextricable link between the fox and shamanistic soul journeys to the underworld. Han medicinal texts confirm this image, for two medical prescriptions uncovered in the archaeological site of Mawangdui blame fox spirits for causing illnesses. Specific incantations had to be uttered in exorcism.¹¹

During the Six Dynasties, the same Guo Pu who eulogized the nine-tailed fox in Shanhaijing summarized the various features of the fox in the following passage:

When a fox is fifty years old, it can transform itself into a woman; when a hundred years old, it becomes a beautiful female, or a spirit medium, or an adult male who has sexual intercourse with women. Such beings are able to know things at more than a thousand miles’ distance; they can poison men by sorcery, or possess and bewilder them, so that they lose their memory and knowledge; and when a fox is a thousand years old, it ascends to heaven and becomes a celestial fox.¹²

Here the fox assumes the roles of a shaman, a diviner, a sorcerer, and a celestial being all at once. Age played a significant role in gaining the power of metamorphosis. A long-lived creature could evolve from a lower animal level to a human being and then to a transcendent. The renowned fourth-century alchemist Ge Hong (283–343) made this point explicitly: “As for all ten thousand things that become aged, their spirits can assume human shape…. At eight hundred years the mi-monkey becomes a yuan-monkey, which after five hundred years more becomes a kuo-monkey…. The tiger and the deer-hare live to a thousand; at five hundred years their coats turn white. When a bear is five hundred years old, it can change itself. Foxes and wolves live to eight hundred, and at five hundred they assume human shape.”¹³

A Tang anecdotal account further explains fox metamorphosis as a form of popular magic: “When [the fox] is about to haunt, it must wear a skull and worship the Big Dipper. If the skull does not fall off, the fox will be transformed into a human.”¹⁴ Another alleged eyewitness account specifies that the transformation takes place in a deserted graveyard under the moonlight:

[The fox] picks up a skull and puts it on its head. It then shakes its head, abandons the skull if it falls off, and chooses another one. It tries four or five skulls until it finally finds one that fits snugly. Then it picks leaves and flowers to cover its body. As it looks here and there [at the leaves and flowers], they all turn into clothes. In no time, the fox turns into a woman.¹⁵

The use of the skull echoes Xu Shen’s definition of the fox as a vehicle for ghosts. In the Chinese yin/yang dichotomy, yin is interpreted as negative, ghostly, evil, female, and impure, whereas yang is positive, celestial, virtuous, male, and pure. It was an ancient and enduring Chinese belief that flesh represented yin while human bones embodied yang. Even in modern times, people still use the mingling of yin elements such as blood or animal meat with yang bones in mortuary ritual to bring the skeleton of the deceased back to life as an ancestor and thus to ensure fertility and family continuity.¹⁶ Also, in Chinese cosmology, the Big Dipper hangs above Mount Kunlun. The two constitute the center of the universe, where yin and yang unite and determine the cosmic order. In Tang and later times, pacing the seven stars of the Big Dipper was conceived as a religious dance joining heaven, earth, and humanity and unifying yin and yang. It was performed in the phase of “honoring the Dipper” of Daoist zhai and jiao rituals, usually held at midnight.¹⁷ The fox and the skull, as well as a midnight ritual in a graveyard setting, were all associated with the world of the dead and darkness, and thus the yin force. In the process of fox transformation, however, the fox and the skull also formed a new dichotomy of yin/yang: the fox stood for yin and used its flesh to join the skull, the yang. The worship of the Big Dipper served as a ritual of joining yin and yang during which the fox would gain vital energy to assume human form.

The fox’s magic, however, ran against the natural cosmic order, which gave supremacy to the yang force and appropriated the yin as an indispensable but inferior opposite.¹⁸ Using the art of metamorphosis and magic, the fox often engaged in spiritual possession of people. As several Tang stories show, foxes created illusionary visions for those they possessed, and the victims would go mad, talk nonsense, and laugh and wail uncontrollably. Fumigating the victims was considered necessary to cure fox bewitchment.¹⁹

The fox was also accused of practicing a particular form of sorcery: cutting people’s hair. In his study of the sorcery scare in 1768, Philip Kuhn has shown that the Chinese believed that losing hair to sorcerers would cause the loss of their souls and that by exerting biodynamic power on the hair, the sorcerers would be able to kill people and use the stolen soul-force for their own purposes.²⁰ The sorcery scares in late imperial times had antecedents. A Later Han story recounts that a man who killed a fox at night examined the animal’s den next morning. He found hundreds of buns of hair cut from human heads. Another Han story explains that people who lose hair to the haunting demon subsequently lose their spirits and die.²¹

Alleged sorcery by fox demons occasionally caused collective panics. Luoyang qielan ji (A Record of Buddhist Temples in Luoyang) tells that the wife of a certain coffin carrier, Sun Yan, was in fact a fox. She cut Sun’s hair off after her true form was revealed and ran away. Thereafter, more than 130 people in the capital lost their hair:

At first the fox transformed into a woman, dressed up with makeup, and walked on the streets. People who met her were drawn to her charm, but those who came near her got their hair cut off. At the time, women who wore flashy dress were accused as fox demons. These incidents began in the fourth month of Xiping and did not end until the autumn of that year.²²

The incident was interpreted differently from an official point of view. Sun Yan’s story dates the haircutting events to a period ranging actually from the fifth month to the autumn of a.d. 517. The official history, Weishu (History of Wei), documents a similar incident forty years earlier, in a.d. 477: “In the first year of the Taihe period, fox demons cut off people’s hair. At the time, Empress Dowager Wenming governed the court. It was a sign of impropriety.” Weishu goes on to record what happened in the capital in a.d. 517: “From the spring of the second year of the Xiping reign, fox demons cut people’s hair in the imperial capital. People were frightened. In the sixth month [of the same year], Empress Dowager Ling gathered all haircutters and ordered them to be whipped by the Chongxun guard Liu Deng outside the Gate of a Thousand Years.”²³ Evidently, the soul-stealing activities of the fox demon were associated with the impropriety of rule by empress dowagers. While the anecdotal account emphasizes Sun Yan’s fear that the fox’s yin might have stolen his yang essence and cost him his life, the official history implies that the empress dowagers’ rule violated the supreme power of the imperial patriarch and subverted the normal order of yin/yang.

Foxes also metamorphosed into handsome men or beautiful women in order to pursue sexual relationships with humans of the opposite sex. A classic example is the story of “Azi (the Purple),” dated to the fourth century. It recounts how a man was bewitched and taken away ...