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Topic: A new bit of into on Inugami (Read 782 times) |
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Dread Blue
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A new bit of into on Inugami
« on: 05/03/07 at 08:09:28 » |
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From: Studies in Mountain Village Life, by Yanagita Kunio et al. From Chapter 5, "Changes in Family Fortunes", footnote 10.
In Japanese popular superstition there are several beings whch are said to hold humans in their magical power. Inugami is one of these creatures. It is believed in in Chugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu Districts. It is a small creature about the size of a rat. It lives in a particular family hereditarily, and goes anywhere with a member of the family. Thus if one marries a girl whose family is possessed by an inugami his own family also becomes posessed of it.
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Mouryo
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #1 on: 05/03/07 at 09:41:36 » |
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Thanks, that`s completely new for me. I always thought the inu-gami would take over the body of its master or was invinsible. Anyway, I`m interested in the ways how an inu-gami is created, how to control them or what happens when you loose control ( Don`t panic I´m not going to summon one since I don`t think such creatures exist in real life).
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Tengu
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #3 on: 05/03/07 at 13:20:32 » |
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I er didn't write the wikipedia article, but it does reflect more or less was in that one "goblin fox" paper from a while back, I think.
Rat-sized inugami sounds similar to the kudagitsune. (I did rewrite that article; check the history for how bad it was when the anime fans first wrote it. Always with the "elemental powers", sheesh)
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| « Last Edit: 05/03/07 at 13:26:40 by Tengu » |
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kurent
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #4 on: 05/03/07 at 14:08:28 » |
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Well you know, there is this one thing I learned recently, on some other forum dealing with Japanese aparitions - the Japanese are a bunch of supersticious hicks, and they dread above all things alterations of their lore, so if something is portrayed in anime, then it is damn near its actual folklore origin, actually. So the anime kiddies are right, actually.
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VilaJunkie
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #5 on: 05/03/07 at 14:12:12 » |
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Oh, actually Tengu, I meant your entry on here. The second paragraph mentions one of the ways of creating an inu-gami. I think it was keeping a dog on a leash and starving it until death.
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Tengu
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #6 on: 05/03/07 at 14:12:46 » |
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Idunno, sounds to me like whatserface is going to get eaten for creating Inuyasha then.
And I won't even describe how much pecking will happen to the eyeballs of whoever created Tactics.
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Kamen
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #7 on: 05/03/07 at 15:32:30 » |
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And what about alchemy? (it’s all the craze now)
Japanese could be conservative about their lore (which I don’t believe very much), but all others are fair game.
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VilaJunkie
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #8 on: 05/03/07 at 16:42:47 » |
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Oh yeah, I rememer on "Full Metal Alchemist", they use the Ouroboros and Mercury's caduceus as "opposing" symbols. Just because one is one snake and the other is two snakes. According to FMA lore, the Ouroboros represents unity and the caduceus represents duality. Yeah, totally ignore the whole Hermetic dogma about knowledge, wisdom, and medicine. And apparently there's also a "fool's gold" version of the philosopher's stone. 
EDIT: Oh, and homunculi can have "elements" and chimaerae are surgeries-gone-bad of humans put together out of different bodies.
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| « Last Edit: 05/03/07 at 16:44:14 by VilaJunkie » |
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Tonguespout
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #9 on: 05/03/07 at 20:00:52 » |
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From the Yurei Info thread:
In some villages, entire families are known to possess spirits. These people are often discriminated against by other villagers. By marrying into a family of spirit holders a person with no spirits becomes a spirit holder?along with his or her extended family. Thus, when someone from a non-holding family is to marry into a holding family, that person is often made to formally severe ties with their extended family (remember the entire in-group out-group concept from part 2-A). It is believed that the origin of these spirit holding families comes from traveling shamans, sales-men, and displaced working class families that settled in an area and relatively quickly became well-off; as with Ikiryou, these people are often strong willed, somewhat different from the others around them: marginalized people who have become successes. These people and families supposedly have spirits (most commonly fox, tanuki, badger, and dog spirits) that do things like take water from a neighbor?s rice paddies and put it into its host?s paddies, and similar such things. The holding of spirits, then, is also a way to explain one person?s successes in comparison with others.
These spirits are often the culprits in cases of spirit possession, which in the case of these working-class farmers or fishers is virtually the same as possession by Ikiryou: the cause and the effect are the same. The spirit is acting on its host?s spoken or unspoken emotions, often jealousy, hatred, or vengeance, and the possession causes a ?wasting away.? Another interesting aspect of these village cases of spirit possession is, fitting in with the entire uchi-soto concept of society, spirit possession occurs only among people in different in-groups, and even then, a spirit attached to a person may possess someone based on the strong emotions of someone else in the host?s in-group. The only notable difference between spirit possession and ikiryou possession in folk belief concearns exorcism: the exorcism of a spirit causes no harm to its host, but the exorcism of an ikiryou can be potentially lethal to the ikiryou's creator.
In these cases of spirit possession, a local shaman is often called in to mediate, and appease the spirit possessing the victim. The spirit?s host and/or the cause of the emotions that sparked the possession are often thereafter looked upon with derision. These spirits act of their own accord, but do so to further the interests of their hosts, that they might be better off. Sometimes, when a spirit holding person begins to have a period of bad luck, it is believed that attached spirits have left the person, prolonging the bad luck.
The phenomena of spirit-holding is most prevalent in villages in which two or more local land owners or ?employers? employ numerous people of the same working class with very little geographical distance between the neighbors (that is, when two or more hierarchical in-groups exist). The ?problem? of spirit holders and the discrimination they face has been dealt with by local authorities on several occasions, including an official decree that there are no spirit holders and a town party were everyone agreed not to discriminate based on held spirits followed by a feast where everyone took part (of course the feast was paid for by spirit holding families).
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Dread Blue
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #10 on: 05/04/07 at 07:23:21 » |
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on 05/03/07 at 14:08:28, kurent wrote:| Well you know, there is this one thing I learned recently, on some other forum dealing with Japanese aparitions - the Japanese are a bunch of supersticious hicks, and they dread above all things alterations of their lore, so if something is portrayed in anime, then it is damn near its actual folklore origin, actually. So the anime kiddies are right, actually. |
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I'm sorry, Kurent, but with everything I've seen in anime (and what little I've seen is not even scratching the surface) I'm disinclined to believe that at all. Everything I've ever seen points to the exact opposite. Could you give some examples of where this is true?
And your last sentence there is a bit unclear. What specifically are the anime kiddies right about? I assume it's something specficic, and not just "everything".
Quote:| From the Yurei Info thread: |
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Something similar to that is, like Tengu said, in the "Goblin Foxes and Other Witch Animals of Japan" paper, but specifically on fox possessing families.
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| « Last Edit: 05/04/07 at 07:27:10 by Dread Blue » |
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Dread Blue
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #11 on: 05/04/07 at 11:23:11 » |
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Today I came across another footnote regarding the inugami, which expands on the above information:
From: Studies in Mountain Village Life, by Yanagita Kunio et al. From Chapter 30, "Community Feelings", footnote 1.
Inugami: literally means dog-god; a type of non-human power that is believed to possess people. Superstitions connected with inugami are seen in Ghugoku, Shikoku, and Kyushu districts, i.e. roughly speaking the western half of Japan. They are believed to be a little animal about the size of a rat. It serves the person whom it possesses and does harm to others against whom the possessed person has some grudge. A family so possessed is called an inugami family, and any house that forms a relationship by matrimony with the possessed house also becomes possessed. Inugami may be seen by the possessed person but remain quite invisible to others. To be possessed by an inugami is a source of annoyance to most families. They say that possessed houses are quick to achieve either prosperity or run. Possessed persons are often subject to epileptic fits, and sometimes behave like dogs. Popular belief is that doctors cannot cure such people, but a magician can cure them by the use of incantations. This information summarized from the Japanese Dictionary of Folklore, Japanese Folklore Institute, Tokyo, 1951, p. 36.
So yes, it seems that inugami can possess houses just like foxes. Seems kind of strange, since foxes and dogs are supposed to be antagonistic, from all I've heard.
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kurent
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #12 on: 05/04/07 at 11:54:10 » |
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on 05/04/07 at 07:23:21, Dread Blue wrote:| What specifically are the anime kiddies right about? I assume it's something specficic, and not just "everything". |
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Well... Everything!
Sorry man, I was being sarcastic. The statement I started out from, i.e. 'The Japanese are superstitious and don't dare change their lore much in modern incarnations', did come from the other forum, but it's 24 carat bullshit, as you correctly surmised. If anything, the Japanese' national speciality is flexibility and adaptation, not only of other nations' (and their own) lore but also culture and technology.
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| « Last Edit: 05/04/07 at 11:55:44 by kurent » |
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Dread Blue
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Re: A new bit of into on Inugami
« Reply #13 on: 05/04/07 at 19:30:22 » |
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I thought you might have been being sarcastic, but I wasn't sure.  
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