Shikigami

The shutters at the house on Tsuchimikado street came down by themselves. No hand touched them and no servant crossed the boards, yet at dusk the wooden panels lowered and the doors drew closed, one after another, in a house where the master appeared to be sitting alone. Visitors noticed. They did not always stay long.

The master was Abe no Seimei, who served six emperors as an onmyōji and died in 1005 at the age of eighty-four. Everyone agreed that something in that house was doing the work. The word for it was shikigami. What nobody has ever managed to say cleanly is what a shikigami actually is.

The oldest surviving mention is not a monster story at all. It is a letter. Around 1001, Sei Shōnagon and Empress Teishi were trading notes after an awkward scene at court, and the empress teased her lady-in-waiting about the truth-detecting god of the Tadasu grove at Shimogamo Shrine. Sei Shōnagon answered that she could not lie even if she wanted to, because the shiki-no-kami would report her straight away. She meant the god of the shikisen, the divination that onmyōji specialised in. There is no explanation attached, which tells you that none was needed. Every literate person in the palace already knew what she meant.

The shikisen ran on an instrument called the shikiban, sometimes the chokuban: a round Heaven panel seated on a square Earth panel, each ringed with twelve marked points, the upper one turned by hand until the twelve month-guardians above lined up against the twelve zodiac signs below. From the resulting arrangement, with a good deal of arithmetic over dates and hours, the diviner read what an omen meant and what should be done about it. The technique reached Japan somewhere around the late sixth or early seventh century and stayed in use until the middle of the sixteenth, when a simpler system drawn from the Book of Changes displaced it. Several Japanese scholars think the two shikigami Seimei was said to keep are nothing more mysterious than those two lacquered panels, and that the twelve guardians he could allegedly summon are the twelve points on the lower one. A calculating device slowly acquired a face.

What turned it into a servant was the Heian obsession with ke, the strange occurrence. A crow drops its mess on a passing gentleman. A dog seizes the hem of its master’s robe and will not let him walk on. In a court where everyone believed such moments were warnings, the onmyōji was the man who could tell an accident from a message, and the shikigami became the personified name for that flicker of recognition, the thing that made you look twice.

The crow story survives. In the Uji shūi monogatari, Seimei watches a bird foul a young and popular chamberlain in the street and understands at once that a curse has just been set. He thinks it a pity that so promising a man should die for someone else’s jealousy, so he goes to him and sits with him the whole night, laying protective spells around the room until the sky greys. At dawn a messenger arrives with news. The curse has turned back, and the onmyōji who sent it is dead. The commission, it emerged, had come from the chamberlain’s own brother-in-law.

The other great test comes in the Konjaku monogatari shū. An old monk named Chitoku travels up from Harima with two young pages in tow and calls on Seimei, ostensibly to pay respects. Seimei looks at the boys, works out immediately that they are shikigami sent to measure him, and quietly conceals them with a chant and a fold of the hands. Chitoku gets halfway home before he realises his attendants have vanished, and comes back to apologise and ask for them. He asks to become a disciple. Chitoku was formidable in his own province, where he had once spellbound a gang of pirates into returning stolen cargo. What he lacked was the trick of handling another man’s shikigami, and that was a matter of texts, which the Abe and Kamo houses kept in the capital and did not share.

The oddest scene belongs to the Ōkagami. On a summer night in 986, Emperor Kazan slipped out of the palace in secret to take vows at Kazan-ji. His party passed Seimei’s gate and heard the diviner inside announcing, from the stars, that the abdication had just happened, and calling for one of his shikigami to go to the palace. Something invisible opened the door, went out, and came back to say that the emperor had already walked past the front of the house. It is a small detail, but it is the one that gives the creature a body. It had to open the door.

Beyond that the descriptions refuse to agree. In the Genpeijōsuiki, Taira no Kiyomori’s wife goes to the Ichijō-modori Bridge to take her fortune from the speech of passers-by, and twelve children with bobbed hair come clapping out of the west, chant a prophecy in unison and vanish east. They are Seimei’s twelve, sealed under the bridge because his wife could not bear the sight of them. The pictures are worse than the texts. The Fudō riyaku engi emaki, a fourteenth-century scroll now in the Tokyo National Museum and registered as an Important Cultural Property, shows Seimei at a ritual table with two helpers half the height of the humans around him, brown-haired, bare and clawed of foot, red and green in the skin, indistinguishable at a glance from the disease demons the rite is meant to drive off. A sixteenth-century copy makes them worse still, with bulging eyes and fangs.

Then there is the tale nobody tells at shrines. The Zokukojidan records that Minamoto no Takaakira, leaving the palace one night in 969, passed the wall of the Shinsen-en garden and saw two tall figures standing back in the shadow. He stamped his feet to warn them off. As he drew level they called him by name. Within weeks he had been swept up in the Anna Incident and exiled to Kyushu, and he never recovered his standing. An onmyōji named Ariyuki explained afterward that shikigami had been buried in that ground as protective charms for the horse races and had never been taken up again. Nobody had thought to remove them. They had gone the way of old tools left to rot, which the Japanese also thought could turn on their owners, and now they simply announced themselves to whoever walked past, with results that had nothing to do with the passer-by’s deserts.

So the powers are broad and the limits are specific. A shikigami knows what is happening and will say so. It moves shutters, opens doors, works as a messenger, stands in at rites, sets a curse and kills. But it is bound to distance and matter like anything else, it belongs to whoever knows the spell rather than to whoever raised it, and it can be stolen or sealed by a better-read rival. It is not inherited either. The last lines of the Konjaku tale say that Seimei’s descendants in the Tsuchimikado house could still hear the things moving about. They could not see them and they could not command them. And a curse that fails does not simply stop; it comes home, and the sender pays.

The honest part comes last. No Onmyōdō text explains any of this. The documentary record contains a single dry line, an index heading to a court noble’s diary noting that in the fifth month of the year 1000 a shikigami was said to be the cause of the Minister of the Left’s illness, and virtually nothing else. Seimei is never once recorded as using one. What the records do show is that real onmyōji went about with boy attendants, one accused curse-layer travelling with a youth named Mononobe no Itomaru, which may be all that anyone ever actually saw. The nearest thing to a living practice survives in the mountains of Kōchi, where the ritualists of the Izanagi-ryū still summon shikiōji out of recited texts to guard a house, break a curse or send one back, and where most of them will tell you they would rather not send one at all, because of what comes back on the wind.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a shikigami?

A shikigami is a spirit servant commanded by an onmyōji, the yin-yang diviner of the Japanese court. It could be sent to spy, carry messages, assist at rituals, perform household chores, or deliver a curse. The word first appears in Heian literature around 1001 with a narrower meaning, referring to the divine presence in the shikisen augury rather than to a servant at all.

Who controlled shikigami?

Onmyōji controlled them, and above all Abe no Seimei (921 to 1005), the most famous practitioner in Japanese tradition. Control depended on knowing the right incantations and hand signs rather than on birth or divine favour, which is why a rival with better training could conceal or seize another man’s shikigami. Seimei’s own descendants could reportedly hear his shikigami in the family house but could neither see nor command them.

What do shikigami look like?

The sources do not agree. Some make them invisible, some describe them as human-seeming boys or as twelve bobbed-haired children, and the Zokukojidan gives two tall figures standing in shadow. The best-known image is the fourteenth-century Fudō riyaku engi emaki in the Tokyo National Museum, which shows them as knee-high attendants with bulbous noses, wide mouths, pointed ears, clawed bare feet and red or pale green skin.

Are shikigami dangerous?

Yes, and not only when someone sends them. Shikigami were used to lay curses, and one such curse in the Uji shūi monogatari kills the man who commissioned it after Seimei blocks it. The Zokukojidan describes shikigami buried at Shinsen-en for a horse-racing festival and then forgotten, which turned into a free-floating hazard that ruined Minamoto no Takaakira simply for walking past.

Did shikigami really exist in Onmyōdō practice?

There is almost no historical evidence that they did. No surviving Onmyōdō text explains what a shikigami is or how to summon one, and the documentary record offers little more than a diary index noting that a shikigami was blamed for a minister’s illness in the year 1000. Abe no Seimei is never recorded as employing one; the tales, the shrines and the picture scrolls did the rest.

Related Entries

Shiki-ōji, Abe no Seimei, Tamamo-no-Mae, Kitsune, Kuda-gitsune, Kitsune-Tsuki, Inugami, Ikiryō, Onryō, Goryō, Tsukumogami, Oni, Golem, Homunculus