Foxy ladies and bad breath

[wombat1138]

Buried in the middle of this long list of garlic trivia, there's the statement, "Because of its stimulating qualities, garlic was never part of Buddhist tradition in China or Japan, whose practitioners felt it would upset one's spiritual balance. Garlic was never adopted into traditional Japanese cuisine and was shunned by Zen masters. On the other hand, legend tells of a Japanese Buddhist priest who hid in the mountains and secretly cured himself of tuberculosis by ingesting large amounts of garlic."

This made me think, "Well hey-- so what do you use to repel Japanese vampires?" The answer seems to be that's a moot issue, since they didn't exist as such until ~1930. There are vaguely similar traditional beasties such as the nekomata/o-bakeneko monster cats (all of which started out as normal cats but later gained supernatural powers; in some cases, the trigger event was lapping the blood of their murdered owner and becoming possessed with the owner's vengeful spirit) and the kitsune-onna shape-shifting vixens (some of them drain their lovers' energy, but doesn't everyone hee hee), but they're generally much more ambiguous figures rather than all being lumped in the category of Eeeeeevil.

Actually, I should take another peek at Carmen Blacker's The Catalpa Bow, which is a study of folk Shinto as practiced by shamanic miko (in organized Shinto, the miko are generally shunted off into the role of "altar girl"-type temporary assistants and the main religious duties are carried out by hereditary male priests)-- iirc in most cases of possession/haunting, the miko's approach to exorcism isn't so much to banish the rogue spirit back to the outer darkness from whence it came, but rather to find out what has disrupted its harmonious place in the world and try to restore it so the spirit can return to rest.

OTOH, in some villages, there are certain families believed to have a hereditary fox-curse on them to the extent that no one else in the village will intermarry with them. This has been speculated (by Blacker, or was this some other book? argh) to date back to agricultural patterns being disrupted by merchants or other nouveaux riches moving into town, causing the old farming families to find some excuse to shun/castigate them; centuries later, no one specifically remembers the relative newcomer status of the foxed families though that info is buried in the villages' central archives, but they're still shunned anyway.

Comments

[eeedge.livejournal.com]

Stupid question from the functionally Japanese ignorant: bakeneko = stupid cat?

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Close, but not quite :) "Stupid cat" would be "baka neko"; "bakeneko" (or sometimes "o-bakeneko" depending on how polite you feel about them) is "monster cat" or similar, related to the word "bakemono" which is usually translated as "monster". (The "-mono" part is roughly equivalent to "thing" or "object", I think-- there're a lot of food terms that mean "fried stuff" or "sauteed stuff" or "simmered stuff" etc. that all end in the same "-mono".)

Haven't actually tried to track down the etymology of the "bake" half before... well gosh, no wonder that looked familiar: the first kanji in "[ba]ke[neko]" and "[ba]ke[mono]" means "change/transformation" and also shows up in a lot of Japanese technical terms about chemistry, probably with a different pronunciation just to be difficult. By itself, "o-[ba]ke" means "ghost" or "monster"; there's probably some subtle difference between that and "[ba]ke[mono]" that I have no idea what it is.

The "idiot" word is usually written in kana, but the traditional ntwo-kanji compound "[ba][ka]" literally translates to "horse deer". No one knows why. It might be a weird phonetic transcription of a word in the Ainu language, spoken by a (relatively) Caucasian indigenous tribe which is now backed into the island of Hokkaido at the northern end of the Japanese archipelago; it might has to do with some sort of picture-based lottery-card system. Or it might be something completely different. Because. :b

[sff-corgi.livejournal.com]

Heh - interesting roots, 'bake' and 'monstare'. Rather changed in their uses, no?

Something that reading/watching InuYasha and related commentary on the series made me think, is that the Japanese spirits/'demons' seem to bear a lot more in common with the Celtic fae than with anything that's been run through either a Semitic or Christianised filter. Both groups of non-humans seem to be far less black&white and more mischevious than blatantly malevolent towards humans for the most part. After all, don't the Seelie and Unseelie Courts usually wrangle with each other for the most part, drawing in humans only occasionally or accidentally?

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

The Greek pantheon also has a certain wild amorality; they have their own clashing sets of rivalry and conflict without much sense that any of them is particularly morally superior to any of the others, or should even be adopted as a role model for human virtue.

But then, I suppose that in a unified polytheistic society, all of their gods and their worshippers really need to be able to co-exist without killing each other on sight, or otherwise the society will have to stop being either unified or polytheistic. I could be wrong, though-- the main modern example is probably India, and I really don't know very much about the internal management of Hinduism, which has been having its own clashes with Islam and the Sikhs.

There's a concept tickling around the back of my brain cell which I'm sure I've read elsewhere, but can't quite recall the source, wrt the switchover from the capricious storm-god of the Old Testament to the (mostly) benevolent sun-god of the New. Almost like a change of administration from Thor to Balder, only... not.