Fangxiangshi

What it is

The fangxiangshi was an exorcist of early China, and the word names an office rather than one man. Two jobs belonged to the role. One was to run the Nuo, the seasonal clearing of sickness-bringing demons out of homes and public buildings. The other was to walk in front of a coffin and empty the burial chamber of wangliang, spirits said to feed on the dead. Texts describe the figure in a hide bearing four golden eyes, with a lance and a shield in hand. Those eyes were read as sight in every direction at once.

Where it comes from

The Chinese classics put the office's beginnings in the late Eastern Zhou, that is 771 to 256 BCE. Emperors kept fangxiangshi on the rolls from Han times (206 BCE to 220 CE) down to the Tang (618 to 907), after which the role passed into popular religion, where a mask with four eyes stood for it. The oldest full account sits in the Zhouli, the Rites of Zhou, in a section titled Offices of Summer and dated to about the 3rd century BCE. Whether the office truly began so early is not settled. A private form of the practice is said to have lasted to the present.

How it is done

During the Nuo, the exorcist and his retinue went through dwellings searching out pestilence and moving it on. A Han-era poem on Luoyang gives the scene at the year's end: lances raised, bundles of reed held aloft, a crowd of youths in dark clothing with red head coverings, bows of peach wood and arrows of wild jujube loosed at random, potsherds and pebbles thrown, torches carried after the retreating spectres, and bridges broken so that they could not return. At a burial the fangxiangshi went into the pit ahead of the coffin and struck its four corners with his lance.

Tools and materials

The ritual texts describe the equipment, though readers disagree about how it was assembled. A bear hide carried four eyes of gold; some take it as a cloak, others as something drawn over the head, and the 2nd-century commentator Zheng Xuan likened such a covering to a qitou, a demon mask. The four eyes matched the four quarters, the directions from which, in the Yellow River Valley, rain, wind, flood and drought were thought to arrive. A lance and a shield completed the gear. After the Tang, a four-eyed mask became the shorthand for the figure.

What it is for

The office met two kinds of danger. Against epidemics, understood as demons that took up residence in buildings, the Nuo worked to shift them out of human space. Against the grave, the aim was the wangliang, beings believed to eat the liver and brain of the dead. Ying Shao, writing about 195 CE, used that belief to explain why tombs were planted with thuja and watched by stone tigers: the creature was said to fear both, and no household could keep an exorcist at the graveside permanently. Protection here covers the living and the body of the dead.

Who does it

The Zhouli gives the staff attached to the office: over forty people, among them four kuangfu, glossed as madmen or mediums, eight diviners with six helpers, scribes, accountants, servants and twenty runners. The fangxiangshi himself ranked among the wu, shamanic specialists inside the imperially sanctioned religion, and served as an official from Han to Tang. The texts do not say how a person was selected or taught. In later centuries the role moved into folk religion and masked performance, so that the exorcist became a part played rather than a post held.

Peoples and places

The practice is recorded in China, and a counterpart survived in Japan. Chinese material runs from the Zhouli through Han poetry and the dynastic histories to the masked Nuo opera of the present. The Japanese figure, hōsōshi, is written with the same characters and appears as an exorcist in Shinto ceremonies. Between the two, the office changed from a place in the state cult to a costumed role. The Zhouli description belongs to the Yellow River Valley, the region whose weather its four-eyed sight was meant to answer.

What people believe

Behind the office lies a world in which illness and misfortune are persons. A demon settles in a house; wangliang wait at a tomb to feed. Sight is the weapon: the four eyes stand for seeing every quarter at once, and the lance strikes the four corners to clear them. Scholars have noticed how close the names run, fangxiangshi beside fangliang, wangliang and wangxiang. Some, among them Chen Mengjia, Kobayashi Taichirō and William Boltz, argued that the exorcist personified the demons he drove out, so that he was in the end casting out himself.

When it is done

The Nuo was a seasonal rite, and the performance at the turn of the year was the great one; the Book of the Later Han places it a day before the sacrifice that closed the year. It came round again as the seasons did, an ordered clearing of the space people lived in. Funerals set the other date, whenever a death occurred: the exorcist went before the coffin and worked at the graveside as the body was laid in. The masked Nuo opera of later times keeps the figure before audiences.

How scholars and sceptics see it

The name carries most of the argument. Zheng Xuan, in the 2nd century, glossed fangxiang with two other characters meaning to banish and to imagine, which has been read as conjuring visions. Édouard Biot offered French renderings, 'inspecteurs de region' and 'preservateur universel'. English attempts run from 'square-faced exorcist' to 'he who scrutinizes for evil in many directions'. William Boltz, reviewing Derk Bodde's work, held that what counted was not the exorcist's look but the visions he called up, and suggested 'Master of Visions'. Boltz considered Bodde to have misread Zheng's gloss. The four-directions reading is common but not the only one.

Compare and confuse

The names crowd together: fangxiangshi, and the demons fangliang, wangliang and wangxiang. Some scholars think they share a single root. Zheng Xuan treated fangliang and wangliang as one being, and Ying Shao's Fengsu Tongyi quotes the Zhouli with wangxiang where the received text has fangliang. The Japanese hōsōshi is the same figure under another reading of the same characters.

Today

Today the fangxiangshi is met as a masked character in Chinese Nuo opera, and the same characters, read hōsōshi, name an exorcist in Japanese Shinto ceremonies. The office that emperors kept from Han to Tang is gone; what survives is a part performed in costume. Chinese tradition also holds that a private form of the practice continued among ordinary people down to the present.

Questions people ask about Fangxiangshi

Good reading and sources

• Fangxiangshi on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data