Hiderigami

Also Known As: Japanese 魃 or 日照り神, “drought god”; also Kanbo 旱母, “drought mother”; Chinese Ba 魃, Hanba 旱魃, Nüba 女魃
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Chinese Mythology, Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Elementals
Mythical Attributes: It carries a heat inside it that pulls the clouds apart, so that rain will not fall anywhere it settles.
Role in Mythos: It is drought given a body, first as the heavenly woman who won the Yellow Emperor his war and was then stranded on earth, later as the thing a starving village went looking for when the sky stayed clear.
Relation to Humans: Every recorded method of dealing with it is a method of moving it along rather than of killing it, and the oldest of those methods begins with dredging the irrigation ditches. When that failed, people turned on whatever they decided the drought demon was hiding in, and in late imperial China that meant a grave.

The rain over the plain of Jizhou stopped as though a door had been closed on it. It had been falling for days, driven sideways, whipped up by the Earl of Wind and the Master of Rain, whom Chiyou had called in when the Yellow Emperor’s dragon Yinglong began hoarding the floodwater against him. Two armies were blind in it. Then a woman in green clothes walked out of the sky, and the storm came apart above her head, and the water went out of the air, and in the flat sunlight that followed Chiyou was caught and killed.

Her name was Ba. The Classic of Mountains and Seas gives the whole of it in a few lines, and the lines that matter come after the victory. She could not go back up. Wherever she stayed, no rain fell.

This is the part that farmers remembered, and it is the reason the same passage bothers to mention that Yinglong, who also burned out his divinity in that battle, went south to live, which is why the south is wet. The war produced weather. The Yellow Emperor’s own daughter had been spent like ammunition and left where she landed, and the ground under her began to die.

The record is unsentimental about what happened next. Shujun, who became the god of fields, went to the emperor about her, and she was resettled north of the Red Water and told to stay there. She did not stay. She kept slipping loose, and the text gives the villagers a procedure for when she turned up: those who wish to drive her out call, “Spirit, go north!” But before anyone calls anything, the passage says, clear the watercourses, open the ditches and drains. The oldest exorcism in the Chinese drought canon starts with maintenance. Dig out the channels first, then shout at the goddess.

She got into the language. The Book of Odes, lamenting a drought that has scoured the hills and dried the streams, says that the drought demon works its cruelty, and hanba wei nüe became one of those phrases that survives long after anyone stops picturing what is doing the cruelty. Which is convenient, because by then the picture had begun to change.

Early Ba is barely described. Green clothes, and a heat so violent it holds the sky open. Commentators later insisted she was bald. Then, several centuries after the fact, comes the Classic of Marvels, a book that presents itself as the work of the Han wit Dongfang Shuo and is nothing of the kind; the Qing imperial editors said flatly that it was written by Six Dynasties literati and passed off as ancient. That is the text that finally hands the drought demon a body. In the south, it says, there is a person two or three feet tall, bare-bodied, with its eyes on the top of its head, running like the wind, and the country it enters suffers a great drought. It walks about in the markets and among crowds. If you meet it, throw it into a latrine and it will die, and the drought will lift.

A goddess who broke a storm over a battlefield had become something you could kill by dropping it down a toilet.

Japan received the second version, and received it in writing rather than in the mouth. The character 魃 is normally read batsu; the reading hiderigami is a Japanese gloss laid over the Chinese word, and the creature arrived through books, chiefly the great illustrated encyclopedia of 1712, which quoted the Chinese pharmacological literature and repeated the two or three feet, the eyes on top of the head, the speed of the wind. When Toriyama Sekien drew it in 1779 he gave it hair all over its body, a single eye in the crown of its skull, and one arm, raised, as it comes out of the mountains. He also passed on the alias kanbo, drought mother, which is the only trace left in the Japanese material of the woman it used to be. There are almost no Japanese folk tales about the hiderigami. It is a creature of encyclopedias and picture books, a Chinese god that entered Japan already reduced to a monster and stayed that way.

In China the reduction went one step further, and this is where the story stops being about a spirit at all. From the middle of the Ming, the hanba was increasingly thought to be a corpse. A body that would not rot, in a grave dug within the last hundred days, with damp seeping through the mound and no grass growing on it, was a body holding the drought in. The dynastic history records the custom under a plain name: beating the drought-bone stake. When the rain failed, villagers opened new graves, dragged out the dead and broke them. The Ming court banned it. The practice continued, and worsened, and by the Qing they were burning the bones instead. Because the old text had said the drought demon stood only two or three feet high, the height of a small child, the Ming writer Xie Zhaozhe noted that in many places it was the graves of children that got opened.

Gaomi, in Shandong, 1804. It had not rained for a long time, and someone noticed that the earth over the grave of Li Xiande, dead since the start of the year, was damp. The villages went past his family, dug him up, opened the coffin, saw that the body was intact, and burned it. The family sued. The Board of Punishments found no precedent for any of it and sentenced the ringleader, a man named Zhong Er, under the statute covering the opening of a grave and the exposure of a corpse: strangulation, held over. The case sits in the Qing legal code as an entry about grave robbery. In parts of central Shandong the burning of drought demons went on into the 1960s.

What she can do has stayed the same through every one of these transformations, because it is only one thing. The heat in her body will not let water condense. Clouds break up over her; wells drop; the paddies open into a mosaic of dry plates you could lift out with two fingers. She is fast, and no version of her is ever described as attacking anyone. She just arrives, and the sky goes empty, and the smell of the fields turns to dust and hot straw.

And every weakness she has is a weakness of position rather than of power. She cannot go home. She can be told to go north, and she goes. She can be pushed off by the cleaning of a ditch, dropped into a privy, thrown on a fire, driven with a dog’s blood. Under Emperor Zhenzong of the Song, when a hanba was said to have drunk a salt lake dry, the Celestial Master sent Guan Yu against it and he needed seven days, and the thirteenth of the fifth month became a rain festival on the strength of it, with the old saying that a great drought never lasts past the thirteenth. In the whole of the record she is never once shown choosing anything. She is summoned, spent, stranded, resettled, shouted at, shrunk, and finally dug up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hiderigami?

A hiderigami is a drought spirit of Chinese and Japanese folklore whose body radiates a heat so intense that clouds cannot form and rain cannot fall wherever it goes. In Japan it is drawn as a small hairy creature with a single eye on top of its head and one arm. In China, where the story begins, it is Ba or Hanba, and it started out as a goddess.

Was the hiderigami originally a goddess?

Yes. The Classic of Mountains and Seas calls her Ba, the daughter of the Yellow Emperor, a heavenly woman in green clothes who was sent down to stop the storm that Chiyou had raised at the battle of Jizhou. She stopped the rain and Chiyou was killed, but she had spent her divinity doing it and could not return to heaven, so she remained on earth, and no rain fell wherever she lived.

How do you get rid of a hiderigami?

The oldest instructions come from the Classic of Mountains and Seas: clear the watercourses and open the irrigation ditches, then call out, “Spirit, go north!” The Chinese Classic of Marvels adds that anyone who meets the creature should throw it into a latrine, which kills it and ends the drought. Nothing in the record describes killing it in open combat.

Why did people in Ming and Qing China dig up graves during droughts?

From the mid-Ming onward the drought demon was believed to inhabit an undecayed corpse, so villages facing a long drought would open recent graves looking for a body that had not rotted, in a mound that was damp and grew no grass. The custom was called beating the drought-bone stake, and it involved dragging out the dead and breaking or burning them. It was outlawed and it carried on anyway; in 1804 a group of villagers in Gaomi, Shandong, burned the corpse of a man named Li Xiande and the ringleader was sentenced to strangulation.

Is the hiderigami Japanese or Chinese?

Both, but it is Chinese first. The creature entered Japan through Chinese books rather than through Japanese village belief, appearing in the 1712 encyclopedia Wakan Sansai Zue and then in Toriyama Sekien’s monster compendium of 1779. Japan kept the Chinese physical description and the alias kanbo, drought mother, but produced almost no folk tales of its own about it.