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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses an account of the 1107 possession of Emperor Horikawa to analyze the ways in which illness was viewed as a crisis of social relationships wherein the relative positions of high and low were reinforced and strengthened.

Paper long abstract:

The idea of a divide between human civilization and the natural has been questioned by ecologists and de-essentialized by environmental historians. Material from medieval Japan, however, further shows how the pre-modern and the non-Western does not predicate any prelapsarian unity with nature. Although members of the Heian court wrote and reacted as if their social and natural worlds were one and the same, the dominant lens through which they viewed disorder in these realms was the human one. Thus, epidemics, famine or war (outer cosmos), or personal illness (inner cosmos) could be caused by justice-seeking displaced spirits of living or deceased humans. This paper performs a close historical reading of the case of one of the more persistent spirits afflicting Emperor Horikawa during his final illness of 1107 to examine the ways in which all things in the world were viewed as part of the social world. According to the Sanuki no suke nikki, a memoiristic account of Horikawa's court, his death, and its aftermath, this particular spirit was finally forced to identify himself: a monk who had been honored by a visit to his temple of residence and who, longing for a return of the royal personage, had come to afflict the ruler whose absence afflicted him. This account fits with numerous accounts in tale literature that similarly narrate how those of lower rank can seek a justice that is otherwise hard to reach in the structure of the Heian court. This style of possession is similar to but contrasts with the dominant type of unruly spirit in classical Japan, the "political victim" appeased in ninth-century goryō-e ceremonies and revived in twelfth-century onryō cults. When these afflicting spirits are compared, we find that those that were powerful in life harmed many, those who were of lower status only tormented individuals, albeit of high rank. The slights, retributions, and appeasement were all activated by links to the moral reciprocity of proper human relations in late Heian thought, which meant that ultimately the power of the dispossessed did not destabilize, but reinforced an economically and ecologically precarious social hierarchy.