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Over the course of modernization and translation, fox folklore has gotten a bit garbled. Here are a few common misperceptions about folkloric foxes. Foxes
are associated with different elements. Note: This page changes frequently as I learn more about foxes. If something here sounds wrong to you, and you have a scholarly or folkloric (i.e., non-anime, non-Hong Kong cinema, non-RPG, non-gaijin-medium-who's-in-touch-with-kitsune) source that says something different from what I've said here, please email me! And when you email me, please tell me your source. Emailing me to say that something on my page is wrong is useless unless you include a) what you think is wrong, and b) what your source is. Foxes are associated with different elements. No, no, no, no, no. Foxes are in no way, shape, or form any kind of elemental creature, nor are there different kinds of foxes for different elements. Various texts may assign elements to foxes, but this is rather like the 18th-century doctor ascribing a particular balance of the four humors to a particular animal—an attempt at description rather than a deep spiritual linkage. The belief that foxes are divided into thirteen clans, each corresponding to one of the lower Japanese elements, comes from a single reference in Kitsune: Japan's Fox of Mystery, Romance & Humor:
This is a belief attributed to a single source, a single Japanese shrine maiden. It doesn't show up in any other source, Japanese or Chinese. In fact, the Chinese gentleman scholars of the 16th and 17th centuries, men who loved to theorize about fox spirits, said absolutely nothing in the translated literature about foxes having any kind of relationship with the elements. However, as Karen Smyers shows in The Fox and the Jewel, Inari worship is intensely personal. Small sects with unorthodox takes on Inari and kitsune are a regular feature of any shrine's life. When Kiyoshi Nozaki, the author of Kitsune, visited a shrine to Inari, he may have found just such a sect centered on a shrine maiden. However, her beliefs never made it into the mainstream of foxlore. Another problem with the idea that foxes are divided into 13 groups is that no such division appears in any Asian culture. Korean fox spirits are all "kumiho," "nine-tailed foxes." Chinese fox spirits are all "huli jing," "exquisite foxes." A few are also "huxian," "transcendental foxes," but that's a marker of spiritual growth similar to the English terms "Saint" or "Blessed," not a designation of a completely different kind of fox. Japanese fox spirits are divided into the foxes who serve Inari, the myobu, and the wild foxes or "field foxes," the nogitsune; the myobu have ranks, but the nogitsune aren't divided any further. If there were generally believed to be 13 types of foxes, elementally aligned or not, they'd have names, and they'd show up in other stories. Fox spirits are a species separate from animal foxes. All foxes—every single fox ever born, from the foxes in the wilds of Japan to the foxes creeping about your back yard at night to the skull that used to be a fox that now sits on a fox-kin's altar—have the potential to become fox spirits. The sole distinction between an ordinary fox and a fox "spirit" is age. Throughout China and Japan, there is (was?) a belief that all things accrue power with age. Humans become wiser and more skilled; wines become stronger; places become more imbued with tradition; ritual objects become more holy. Animals, if they live long enough, develop magical skills and human intelligence. Foxes, already imbued with a little more intelligence than mere animals should have, are specialists in longevity.* According to Feng Menglong, who quotes from a lost source of the third or fourth century:
Tales of foxes knowing something a thousand miles away are uncommon. It's easier to find stories of two-hundred-year-old foxes who barely know what's going on under their own powdered noses; the foxes whose story Feng goes on to tell are all several hundred years old, and most of them show the wisdom and foreknowledge of an overripe apricot. However, the general pattern holds true in all stories where a fox's age is given: A fox develops or learns the ability to transform itself after living fifty or a hundred years, and continues to grow in power after that. As you can see, the term "fox spirit" is a misnomer. It is an English-language invention with scant parallels in actual Asian terms for foxes with magical powers. In Korea, fox "spirits" are "nine-tailed foxes"; in China, they are "exquisite foxes" or "transcendental foxes"; in Japan, they are merely "foxes," or perhaps "white foxes" or "wild foxes." The Japanese also—rarely—call "spirit" foxes youko, or you foxes. You is a complex term that means that something has been touched by the world of magic and the spirit, not necessarily in a good way; it tends to be translated as "ghost" or "demon" or "fairy." Since the Asian concept of the spirit world is more permeable than the European concept, a creature that is now a ghost-demon-fairy-spirit may well have been born a perfectly ordinary animal.
With the total absence of male foxes from popular translated tales, it's easy to assume that all foxes are female. Fortunately for the perpetuation of the race, this is untrue. Male foxes are earnest scholars, drinking buddies, thieves, benefactors, and poltergeists; they can also be lovers, but this is less common than you might think, since they prefer women to men. (Chinese and Japanese folktales like to keep seductive strangers away from the womenfolk. When foxes are involved, they like to keep women out of the protagonist's role entirely.) They can, upon occasion, be rapists. The only thing male foxes can't do that vixens can is to marry into a human family. Foxes are strongly associated with yin, the cold, dark, feminine principle. One text states that because they are nocturnal, they are rarely touched by the sun's aging rays, and this is why they are so long-lived; another says that because foxes are inherently yin, they are also inherently feminine. "Feminine" isn't the same as "female," though. (This also appears to be a minority opinion, since most male foxes aren't depicted as being feminine.)
Foxes can transform into any kind of person, animal, or object. Japanese foxes can, indeed, change themselves into anything, from an old man to a young beauty to a statue of the Buddha to an impossibly tall cedar tree. One fox even transforms itself into a second moon. Foxes seem to prefer to be human, with the form of statues of Kuan Yin or Buddha a distant second, and all other forms taking a far, far third. I've found only one story in which a fox takes on the form of another animal. The transformation doesn't seem to be easy—the effort to blip between several forms overcomes the less-than-bright fox who tries it—and folklore takes a dim view of foxes who change into nonhuman forms. In every story I've found so far, foxes who take on nonhuman forms are exposed and forced to flee, or are caught and killed... and sometimes eaten. In China, foxes can transform themselves into any kind of human being, provided they have the spiritual cultivation or power to take on a particular form. They may also be able to take on the form of images of Kuan Yin. They never change into other objects or animals, though. This is because Chinese foxes' transformations are part of their attempts to gain enlightenment or immortality; humans hold the key to both, so futzing around dressed like a cat or a gopher won't help the fox. Foxes' half-human forms look like a human with fox ears and a fox tail. Foxes traditionally have three forms:
Foxes' human faces are often triangular, like a real fox's, and this attribute sometimes suggests that the human is in fact a fox in disguise. However, ordinary humans can also have this facial shape. A fox gains tails as a sign of spiritual advancement or as a reward for great deeds done. This remarkably tenacious idea came from a series of fantasy novels by Mercedes Lackey, who based her version of the kitsune on a MU*. It's compelling and has a certain internal consistency, but it's as folklorically accurate as anything else you'll learn on a MU*. In some real traditions, foxes gain tails with age, at the rate of one per century. (In these traditions, one-, five-, seven-, and nine-tailed foxes are common, but not the other possible numbers of tails.) In other traditions, foxes stay one-tailed until they are ready to become nine-tailed foxes. Nine-tailed foxes are universally considered powerful—the Platonic form of a spirit fox, so to speak. There are no genuine stories that I know of involving a ten-tailed fox, and no support for the idea that tails are badges of accomplishment. Foxes store power in their tails. This idea comes from the fact that a fox's powers increase as its number of tails increases. It's an appealing idea, but inaccurate. A fox's powers increase as its age increases, and the number of its tails also increase as a sign of age, but the two aren't directly related. It's like saying that humans store their intelligence in their gray hair. So where do foxes store their power? In many stories, nowhere. Foxes' power derives from their ch'i or qi, the "lifeforce" that pervades all things. Like Taoist masters, foxes who have cultivated their ch'i contain uncommon amounts of ch'i in their bodies and can also affect the ch'i of the world around them. There's no one source of power, unless you consider the soul a source. In other stories, all of which are Japanese, foxes store their
power in the white balls they play with. These "wish-fulfilling
jewels" contain their powers in the same way as a dragon's
pearl, and capturing a kitsune's ball puts it in your power. Not
all stories agree on the nature of kitsunes' balls, though; some
are just toys, or objects that contain some power but don't have
enough power to control the kitsune who made them. To read more
about wish-fulfilling jewels, check out The Fox and the Jewel:
Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship,
by Karen Smyers. The child of a fox and a human is a half-fox. A fox's child by her human husband is human, plain and simple—but not boring. Foxes' human children have unusual qualities. In both China and Japan, they are often "big men," physically or culturally—that is, they're huge and strong, or politically and socially important, or both.* Sometimes their fox mothers teach them magic, or they inherit magic in their blood; a few Japanese sorcerors were descended from foxes. There's also a grab bag of traits they can have to show their fox ancestry. For example, in one Chinese story, a fox's human daughter is beautiful, kind, skillful, and in every way a perfect wife—except that she laughs all the time. In a version of "Kuzunoha," the fox-wife Kuzunoha sees her son eating beetles, and laments that he has inherited her animal blood. (Real foxes do eat beetles.) It seems that the people telling fox stories agreed that the child of a human and a fox had to be touched in some way, but they don't agree on exactly how the child is touched, or perhaps each offspring of a fox is different. To read one story of a Japanese fox's human child, check out the story "Come and Sleep." At the end is the tale of Kitsune's granddaughter. * The person who first asked me about foxes' children pointed out that it's ironic that foxes' children can be strong, since foxes themselves are weak. Foxes never win a physical fight with a human. In Japanese, a fox's bark is written, "Kitsu! Kitsu!" This myth comes from a folk etymology of the word "kitsune," in which "kitsu" is onomatopoeia for a fox's bark and "ne" means "sound." Therefore, a fox is something which makes the noise "kitsu." Whether this derivation of the word is true or not, it's been a long, long time since Japanese foxes said "kitsu." Modern Japanese write the fox bark as "kon kon." |
