Well, it’s the holiday season, so go ahead and hop onto my lap and tell Asian Santa
what you want for Christmas.
What’s that? You want the gift of knowledge.
Okay, well let me tell you about onmyōji 陰陽師 and their magical rituals.
Onmyōji were wizards who practiced the magical art of Yin and Yang,
and their golden age was in the Heian Period of Japan.
People thought they could do all kinds of magic, like reading your fortune,
driving out demons and evil spirits, and even turning little paper dolls into their servants.
Now we know today that magic isn’t real. Magicians are liars,
Magic: The Gathering is just arguing with paper,
and Disneyland’s Magic Kingdom runs on the manipulation of children through marketing.
The only real magic is the magic that comes from a sip of boba tea.
But to the Heian Japanese, magic was real, and onmyōji wielded it.
Onmyōji were part of the government. They were public servants, kind of like a mailman,
but instead of bringing you mail, he brought you magical protection.
But onmyōji also sold their services, so kinda like a mailman that you paid every time he brought you the mail.
People also wrote to onmyōji asking for advice. So like a mailman that you paid but you could also
call him up specifically for suggestions on how to write letters.
At this point, I’m gonna skedaddle from this analogy like I do with all my problems that snowball out of control.
Two clans specialized in churning out onmyōji:
the Abe 安倍 and the Kamo 賀茂.
For the magical art of Yin and Yang, these two clans were like the Coke and Pepsi of their time.
The Tesla and Edison. The Windows and Windows 7.
So like with a doctor, if someone didn’t like the advice of one clan, they went to the other clan to get a second opinion.
The two top onmyōji in the Heian Period were Kamo no Yasunori 賀茂 保憲
and his student Abe no Seimei 安倍 晴明.
Abe no Seimei is the name that every onmyōji enthusiast knows of, and will instigate
a civil rights protest in the comment section if you don’t mention him in your YouTube video.
There was also Abe Lincoln, who also wore a tall hat and fought supernatural creatures.
So how did one become an onmyōji? Well you had to go learn from the onmyōji masters.
They took in a limited number of students, chosen from among the nobility class
probably through the typical Heian methods of nepotism and dirty politics.
These smooth-cheeked students spent time at Onmyōji Hogwartsu learning
all about the tools of the trade, and the magical art of Yin and Yang.
After some time, after growing some hair on their asses, they became fully working onmyōji.
They were mostly employed by the upper class in the capital.
Now you may think that only a few people wanted their services, like the number of people today who go
to fortune-tellers to lose money, but no. Onmyōji were super busy.
People were like hypochondriacs, but for spiritual health.
If a Heian noble had something weird happen to him, he called an onmyōji to ask what it meant.
They kept sending messages to onmyōji asking for advice about the smallest things,
like where to plant a tree to best protect from evil spirits.
Heian nobles paid onmyōji to do all kinds of tasks.
These are fun to talk about because people believed things you’ve never even thought of.
It really puts you into the superstitious mindset of the Heian Japanese.
One of the most important things onmyōji did was to pick the best locations for buildings,
based on how much spiritual protection the location had.
For example, when someone wanted to build a house, he’d call up an onmyōji to ask where he should put the house.
Seems simple, right?
WRONG, you stupid shoe. Let me tell you about the Four Guardians.
The idea originally came from China.
Each of the 4 cardinal directions is associated with a mythical beast, a guardian.
Seiryū 青龍 to the East,
Suzaku 朱雀 to the South,
Byakko 白虎 to the West,
and Genbu 玄武 to the North.
Each guardian is also associated with a geographical feature.
Seiryū is represented by running water. Suzaku, still water.
Byakko, a road. And Genbu, high ground.
So the ideal spot for a building was one that was right in the middle of these 4 things.
That way, the building is protected on all sides by the guardians. People took this idea very seriously.
People would send urgent letters to their onmyōji asking really specific things like,
“Hey I’m about to buy a house, should the river next to it be flowing west to east, or north to south?”
And onmyōji would tell people things like, “Hey, build a pond here on the south side”
or “Plant some trees on the north side, because that’s kind of like high ground.”
Also, ready to have your mind blown into a dirty tissue?
The Heian capital, which would later be called Kyoto, happened to sit right in the middle of these 4 features.
The Kamo River to the East. Ogura-ike Pond to the South.
The San’indō road to the West. And Mt. Funaoka to the North.
Unfortunately, Ogura-ike Pond no longer exists,
so Kyoto is currently vulnerable to the South. C’mon North Korea, show us what you got.
But to be honest, they probably did not choose the capital location because of this.
It was the reverse. The idea became popular after the capital was already built.
They saw the 4 geographical features that surrounded them and attached those symbols
of running water, still water, road, and high ground to the Four Guardians.
Another thing onmyōji did was drive out evil spirits from abandoned homes.
People believed a home left empty for a long time collected evil spirits, demons, and generally bad things.
Like if they saw someone lurking in an empty house, they would think it was a demon, or even a fox in disguise.
So before moving into an empty home,
they called an onmyōji over to perform a ritual to exorcise these squatter ghosts.
This is usually a henbai 反閇 ritual.
It involved chanting a spell and stepping on the ground in a pattern, and maybe doing some hand movements.
One foot pattern went like this: left foot, right-left, right foot, left-right, left foot, right-left.
Now it sounds silly, but when you see it in real life, it looks silly too.
This ritual was originally used before going into danger, before a perilous journey, or before going to war,
but by the mid-Heian Period, these orange juice drinking pansy nobles
used it when they moved into an empty home.
Because empty homes were that scary.
The henbai ritual was a specialty of the famous Abe no Seimei.
One of the funnest customs that came out of Yin Yang beliefs was the idea of unlucky directions.
They believed that there were certain violent gods that moved around a lot, traveling from one compass direction to another.
If you move in the direction of one of these gods, it would be unlucky.
And not just the vague, uncertain bad luck like oh no you broke a mirror, who knows could happen?
No, your family members could die in some cases. We ain’t playing around kid.
For example, if you spent the night at your mistress’ house and wanted to go back home to the west,
but it just so happened that for a few days a god resided in the west, you wouldn’t be able to go west.
You’d go southwest and crash at a friend’s place for the night, then go northwest back home the next day
to get a beating from your wife.
Where a god resided depended on the year, the season, the month, and a million different things.
So a god could stay in the West for one day, then move to the Northwest and stick around for a few days,
then hang around North for a few more.
Sometimes a god would go crazy and stay in one direction for a freaking year or more,
but even people back then realized that it would’ve been ridiculous to not go west for a year.
In that case, you only had to avoid the taboo direction on certain days.
So yeah it got complicated.
Who knows what would’ve happened without onmyōji there to calculate the gods’ movements.
Disaster, that’s what.
Onmyōji liked to play with little dolls, but these weren’t the Barbie dolls you used to play with when you were a kid
and tried to hide because dolls were for girls,
no these were magical, and had more realistic proportions.
One type of doll was made of paper, wood, grass, leaves, or straw.
It was cut into kind of human form, maybe a mecha form.
To purify someone, an onmyōji would rub the doll on the person’s body, then cast it into a river or something,
getting rid of the spiritual pollution.
An onmyōji could write a person’s name on it and curse or hurt someone by poking holes in it or
ripping off a part of it.
Or an onmyōji could take two dolls, each with a name, and pray for two people to fall in love.
Onmyōji can imbue another type of doll with a spirit, making it his servant.
The possibilities were endless!
The onmyōji’s main duty was to offer the emperor and the state protection. Magical rubbers for the country.
They interpreted omens. When an accident or something strange happened in a public building,
a temple, or a shrine, they asked an onmyōji to investigate and figure
out what it meant and if they needed to perform some ritual.
They did a lot of purification rituals to cleanse curses and calm vengeful ghosts. Such rituals can be huge.
In one case, after the capital was moved, a purification ritual commenced that had
2000 people chanting and 2700 lit lamps.
During the New Year, onmyōji went around town purifying harmful energies and particularly negative areas,
to ensure the new year started clean. Because when a year starts great, it stays great.
Onmyōji led three yearly state ceremonies. One to protect the capital against spirits,
one to protect it against fires, and one to protect it against diseases.
Disease defense was a biggie. As Japan grew and built roads, more people moving around
meant epidemics spread like jealousy in a group of close teenage girlfriends.
Disease outbreaks rampaged across the country, leading to famines because farmers died off.
The numerous droughts didn’t help either.
The devil traveled the country dual-wielding sickness and starvation.
Bodies literally piled up by roadsides and floated down rivers.
So the roads and rivers, the means of transportation critical to the state and the economy,
became sources of spiritual contamination.
People thought ghosts and evil spirits haunted the roads and rivers.
Onmyōji were often seen performing roadside rituals to drive away the dead and cleanse the ground,
especially along paths of disease spread.
Despite the common belief that the Japanese did not do animal sacrifices, these rituals did include sacrificing animals,
especially horses and cattle.
It may have been considered the best way to stop epidemics.
The court did try to stop animal sacrifice and blood offerings by passing edicts saying “Stop that.”
Killing animals wasn’t a very Buddhist thing to do. But people just kept doing it.
All in all, as you can see,
onmyōji were a critical part of daily life for the elites in the Heian Period.
For more on onmyōji and their origins, check out this video.
I’d like to thank the new patrons this week, Nika, Liz Bonanza, and Savanah Bonanza.
Savanah actually signed up on Patreon for her mom Liz as a Christmas present, so I’m gonna cry now.
Alright you guys, I love you, and spread the knowledge!