Goryō

The goryō (御霊, «honourable spirit») is the spirit of a nobleman, a prince or a high official who died the victim of a political injustice: a banishment, an execution, a forced abdication, a charge manufactured by rivals at court. It shares its engine with the common onryō, namely the grievance, but differs from it in two things that change everything. The first is the reach: its wrath does not pursue only those who wronged it, it falls upon the whole capital as epidemics, droughts, fires, earthquakes and lightning, so that the harm is public and the answer must be public too. The second is the treatment it receives: a goryō is not exorcised, it is venerated. The very name carries the honorific prefix «go», and calling it an honourable spirit is already the first gesture of appeasement. It emerges as a category in the Heian period, when the court begins to read every collective misfortune as the bill for a wrong done to someone powerful.

The cult has a documented founding date. In 863, the fifth year of the Jōgan era, the court held a goryō-e in the Shinsen-en garden of Heian-kyō, a public ceremony of appeasement, to calm six wronged spirits to whom the epidemic ravaging the city was attributed; among them were Crown Prince Sawara and Prince Iyo. The official chronicle Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku, completed in 901, records it in detail: there were sutra readings, music, dance and archery, and the grounds were opened to the people. Six years later, in 869, the Gion goryō-e raised sixty-six halberds (hoko), one for each province of the empire, to absorb the pestilence; from that ceremony the Gion Matsuri of Kyoto descends in a direct line. What matters is not the ritual but the doctrine behind it, the goryō-shinkō: when the wronged dead held power in life, the only effective policy is to give them cult. Fear thus becomes an institution, with shrines, a calendar and a budget.

Tradition gathers three figures as the three great vengeful spirits of Japan, and all three are in this catalogue. Sugawara no Michizane, scholar and minister, was banished to Dazaifu in 901 through Fujiwara intrigues and died there in 903; when lightning struck the palace in 930 and killed several courtiers, the court concluded it was him, restored his ranks and finally raised him the Kitano shrine in 947, where he is venerated as Tenjin. Taira no Masakado rebelled against the court and went so far as to proclaim himself a new emperor before falling in 940; his head, displayed in the capital, stars in the legend of the skull that flies back to Kantō, and his mound in Ōtemachi is still treated with respect, besides the cult he receives at Kanda Myōjin. Sutoku Tennō was forced to abdicate, lost the Hōgen rebellion of 1156 and died banished in Sanuki in 1164; according to the Hōgen Monogatari he bit his tongue and wrote in his own blood the vow to become a great demon of the realm, and tradition has him pass into the form of a daitengu. None of the three began as a monster: all three were first the losers of a power struggle.

Against a goryō no exorcism is any use, and tradition does not pretend otherwise: what works is reparation. The repertoire is well documented and runs from less to more, from the posthumous restoration of the rank and offices stripped from him, through Buddhist services and appeasement ceremonies, to the definitive remedy, which is deification: turning the wronged one into a kami and giving him a shrine, a priesthood and an annual festival. Michizane is the model case, and his trajectory explains the paradox that today puzzles any visitor, because the Tenjin whom students ask to pass their exams is exactly the same spirit to whom the tenth-century court attributed the lightning over the palace. The benevolence came afterwards and was born of fear. That is the lesson the goryō leaves in Japanese culture: a wrong committed by the State is not closed by punishing the dead, but by admitting in public that there was injustice.