Onmyoji Lineage
Masters of the Calendar and Their Quiet Hegemony
Onmyoji [陰陽師]. Because they appear in novels, films, anime, and other content, the name is familiar in Japan, yet almost nothing is known of what they actually were or through what lineage they emerged. And the question of whether the cultural inheritance the Onmyoji left behind still dwells in Japan today is one of the things that most draws my curiosity.
The word Onmyoji first calls to mind a special class of technicians operating in the unseen world. The abilities ascribed to the image of the Onmyoji are diverse, but activity staged in the unseen world is the premise. They manipulate the gods, see through the forms of demons, drive people to death through curses, inflict calamity, or conversely avert it. These were the duties assigned to them, and for more than a thousand years they permeated the core of Japan’s structures of power.
In other words, when we turn to the historical influence of the Onmyoji, we can say that the cultural inheritance or spiritual inheritance they left has still not vanished from Japan. It has merely been covered over within us. The keyword for understanding them lies in the curse, but the curse is not negative in meaning and must be seen from many angles.
In speaking of the Onmyoji, the most famous in history is a single sorcerer named Abe no Seimei (921–1005). Famous enough that every Japanese person knows his name, Abe no Seimei is still enshrined today at the Seimei Shrine built in a corner of Kyoto. Yet the image generally told as Abe no Seimei was idealized by later ages. Around the eleventh and twelfth centuries when Abe no Seimei died, the “ideal Onmyoji” that the people inside Heian-kyo at the time pictured was syncretized under the name of this man of immense influence, and the image took form. The outline of the Onmyoji in historical fact and the image of the Onmyoji conveyed through Abe no Seimei as continually retold content carry a decisive divergence. The point is not to be misled here.
Personally, the Onmyoji who actually operated are far more interesting than the Abe no Seimei told as story. They were rare people who cut deep into the core of the court and religion and the worlds of nobles, royalty, monks, shrine priests, and commoners, and yet went on existing quietly. Such people are rare even historically and have no parallel. What is told as the image of the Onmyoji is sorcery, but the true ground on which they held quiet hegemony for centuries does not lie there. Then what exactly was the wellspring that let the Onmyoji go on operating in the open and behind the scenes? It was the calendar.
Let us begin here by changing how we think about the calendar. The present calendar has standardized the cycle of a seven day week with Sunday as the fixed day of rest. Three reasons mainly account for why this calendar took hold. Christianity and Islam, both strongly influenced by Judaism, expanded explosively as world religions. The seven day span was convenient for managing workers in a world where capitalism had taken hold. And the seven day period sat well with the lunar calendar based on the waxing and waning of the moon. These three reasons spread together with the expansion of modern industrial society. We must not forget that behind this lies a history in which the calendars indigenous to each region were destroyed. The key to achieving modernization in fact lies in destroying the calendar used until then.
In other words, if an intense negation of modernization were to arise from each country and people, the most effective method would be first of all to return the calendar to what it was before the new calendar. In Japan, for instance, the present calendar is called the new calendar and what was used before it the old calendar. Considering that Japan received no influence from Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, discarding the new calendar connects to a movement of recovering sovereignty after modernity. But there is an interesting episode.
Back in 2011, as shifts in the climate began to change greatly, the Japan Weather Association set up a preparatory committee aiming to create new twenty-four solar terms suited to the climate of modern Japan and solicited opinions from the public. Around the autumn of 2012 it announced the “Twenty-four Solar Terms of the Twenty-first Century” and showed its intent to establish them. Then a certain organization pushed back fiercely. That was the industrial world.
Industry argued that it would confuse the sense of season cultivated until now and applied intense pressure on the government and others. As a result the plan was abruptly canceled. Industry speaks of a sense of season, but in essence this is worker management. Its disturbance is inconvenient for them, and so the logic is that no matter how the climate fluctuates, they will not permit any alteration of the new calendar adopted since the Meiji period.
But the present calendar is a dry and tedious thing. After all, we human beings were not born to be managed as workers, and there is no reason to be bound to a calendar on such a premise. If it were religiously or devotionally reasonable that would be one thing, but outside of that there should be no need to obey. Building on this point, the original calendar is a conversion of the “time” surrounding us into the visual. In the ancient China that greatly influenced the Japanese calendar, the calendar recorded the past and was at the same time a tool for predicting the future, and this character makes the calendar familiar and commonplace while at once making it a profound and difficult presence.
Just as the modern calendar standardized along the lines described above, there has always existed a world line in which “the one who holds the calendar grasps the world.” Perhaps what humanity must turn its eyes to is “who holds the calendar.” Remote work and the like took hold out of the pandemic, for example, yet the framework of the calendar as “worker management” itself has not changed at all. In every era the calendar carries a character reflecting the self display of those who rule, and because it holds this character, the particular group able to manipulate the calendar can hold power. In the case of Japan, that was the Onmyoji.
The work of the Onmyoji lay in making a calendar suited to the age and judging the daily fortune and the directional taboos. As a result, as technicians who managed “time,” they could go on sitting inside Japan’s structure of power for more than a thousand years. Yet why the Onmyoji could enter the core of power, how their influence persisted so quietly, and what flowed from there into the substratum of the present are never spoken of. So let us first turn to their origins.
As a fundamental premise, the source of the Japanese Onmyoji lies in China. In China too there were people called School of Yin-Yang [陰陽家], and the duties they carried closely resemble those of the Japanese Onmyoji. The reason is plain. Onmyodo [陰陽道] is the art of the Onmyoji and a way later born uniquely in Japan, and its essence has its origin in a distinctive Chinese technique that encompassed everything from the mathematics of “number” to magic. Yet the Chinese School of Yin-Yang did not simply cross over and become the Japanese Onmyoji. An interesting history lies hidden here.
The important point is that the Onmyoji as a class of technicians did not arrive from China. The wisdom held by the Chinese School of Yin-Yang was transmitted to Japan in fragments and in succession, and the Japanese Onmyoji were born independently through a final integration and elevation. Because of this, surprising as it may be, the first carriers who brought the divination, calendrical methods, and sorcery attached to the Onmyoji into Japan were the monks attached to the Buddhism that arrived in the sixth century. At first glance the Onmyoji and monks seem to bear no correlation, but in Japan the two were in fact bound together at a deep level.
At the temples for propagating the newly arrived Buddhism, observances such as the Buddha’s birth ceremony and the nirvana ceremony had to be held on particular days and their hours fixed. This precision did not exist in earlier Japan, and the era of judging by the movement of the sun and the waxing and waning of the moon was greatly updated. But here the first problem arises. Historically, the East Asian calendar was a Chinese led lunisolar calendar, and its calculation was not as simple as the present Western solar calendar.
Unlike a unified state such as China where a web of power already ran across the whole land, early Buddhist Japan had not realized governance to that extent. As recorded in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki compiled in the first half of the eighth century, the court holding the emperor of the time had partially subjugated and allied with other countries, but most were not under its rule, and the range its influence reached was limited.
And so however much the court based mainly in Yamato (the south central area of present day Nara Prefecture) tried to spread the influence of Buddhism, the calendar did not circulate across the whole country. Even when it tried to hold Buddhist observances nationally on the same day, naturally that could not be realized. From these circumstances arose the need for the temple monks to calculate the calendar themselves, and what they adopted here was the water clock invented in China and called the rokoku [漏刻]. By building this rokoku, the monks carried out a provisional means of announcing the time.
Beyond the matter of expanding propagation, the monks also had to treat the sick with medicine and sorcery when illness appeared, chant sutras to remove disaster, and predict national crises through astrology. In a Japan that had no connection to Buddhism, this was an indispensable stage for a foreign religion to penetrate. The royalty, nobles, and clans of the court, and the commoners besides, had no need to go out of their way to take refuge in a foreign religious organization without practical benefit. The benefits that mattered in particular to those who ruled were the stable expansion of their reign, the prevention of internal revolt, and the absorption of the not yet subjugated countries under their own rule.
Whether or not they could meet this demand. The key to Buddhism taking root in Japan lay here, and because trial and error had already been repeated on the Chinese side, problems of this kind were steadily solved. Personally, I consider that the greatest reason the Christianity preached by the missionaries who poured into Japan one after another in the Age of Discovery did not take root lies here.
Many monks who sensed these circumstances of the court took on even what was not originally a monk’s work and were pressed by the need to acquire the advanced techniques flowing in from the Chinese side. But they had a strength. It was their command of the kanji that were precious at the time, for the sake of reading scripture, and the concept of number they had acquired by way of China.
The knowledge of the early Onmyoji was “quiet” and tends to be overlooked. Behind this lie two things. First, “letters” and “calculation” were a form of power only a few specialists could handle. Second, monks living inside Buddhism carried the role of the early Onmyoji, and this peculiarity too kept them from view. But this quiet era of the Onmyoji shook greatly, and an opportunity for them to rise all at once was born. The key man was Emperor Tenmu.