Abe no Seimei

Every monster tradition eventually needs one human who can handle monsters. In Japan that man is Abe no Seimei, and the strange thing about him is that he was real.

Not "based on someone real." Real. He was born in 921 and died in 1005, he held an actual government post, he advised emperors, and he lived to eighty-four at a time when that alone looked like sorcery. His job title was onmyōji — a practitioner of the Way of Yin and Yang — and here is the detail that tells you how seriously Japan took this: he worked for the Bureau of Onmyō, a real department of the imperial government, staffed and salaried, responsible for divination, calendars, timekeeping, and the reading of omens. The state had a ministry for the supernatural, and Seimei was its best employee.

Then the legends got hold of him, and they have not let go in a thousand years.

His mother was a fox

The story that everyone knows first is the one about his birth. A man out in the countryside saves a white fox from hunters. Not long after, he meets a woman named Kuzunoha, marries her, and has a son. They are happy for years.

Then the boy, still small, sees his mother's tail.

Kuzunoha writes a farewell poem on a paper screen — if you love me, come and find me in the forest of Shinoda — and goes back to being a fox. The boy she leaves behind is Abe no Seimei, and everything uncanny he can do afterwards is explained by the half of him that came out of the woods.

It is a beautiful bit of folk logic. The greatest human authority over spirits is himself not entirely human, which is why he understands them, and why they answer him.

What he could actually do

The legends give him a specific and rather corporate set of powers.

He saw spirits from childhood, before he was trained, spotting demons in a procession that the adults around him walked straight past. He commanded shikigami — bound spirits that functioned as servants, messengers, and enforcers, and which his wife supposedly found so unsettling that he kept them under a bridge rather than in the house. He read the future accurately enough that emperors made policy on it. And he had a rival, Ashiya Dōman, with whom he conducted the sorcerous equivalent of public prizefights: sealed boxes to be divined, curses traded, one of them ending in Seimei's death and resurrection depending on which telling you get.

His hand is on the great monster stories too. When the court needs to know where the demon king Shuten-dōji has taken the stolen women of Kyoto, it is Seimei who divines the location and sends the heroes to the mountain. Centuries later, when a nine-tailed fox disguised as an imperial concubine is quietly killing an emperor, it is a diviner of Seimei's own lineage who exposes her. He is the switchboard the whole tradition runs through.

The star

His emblem is a five-pointed star drawn in a single unbroken line — the seiman. Each point is one of the five phases of the old cosmology: wood, fire, earth, metal, water, each generating the next around the circuit, which is why the line never lifts.

It is worth saying plainly, because people see it and assume: this has nothing to do with Western occultism. It arrived in Japan through Chinese natural philosophy and it means containment and cyclical order, not anything borrowed from European magic. It is all over Seimei Shrine in Kyoto — which was founded in 1007, two years after he died, on the site of his house. He was being venerated almost before he was cold.

He never stopped working

The last chapter is modern. Since about 1989, through a series of hugely popular novels and the films made from them, Seimei has been rebuilt for a new audience as a beautiful, languid, faintly amused young courtier — less a grandfather of divination than a detective with excellent robes. It is a genuine reinvention and it is now the dominant image, which is worth knowing when you meet him in a film and wonder why the historical record describes someone in his sixties.

Merlin has no grave. Seimei has a shrine, a documented career, a personnel file, and a queue of people outside on the anniversary of his death. He is what happens when a country's greatest wizard turns out to have been a civil servant.