Tamamo no Mae (玉藻ノ前) (role )

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Biography:

"During the reign of Emperor Toba, a beautiful woman appeared mysteriously at his palace. She was a brilliant woman, who had the wisdom and the education to allow her to reply to any question asked her by anyone in the court, including the emperor, and she was an unparalled beauty who gave off a wondrous fragrance and emitted a light from her body. The people called her Lady Tamamo no Mae. The emperor felt some fear of her, but he was overcome by her beauty and took her as a consort. The emperor then fell to a serious illness, the cause of which was not well known, and none of the medical treatment he underwent was effective. He thus ordered the fortuneteller Abe no Yasunari to make a divination, from which it was learned that the cause of the emperor's illness was the woman Tamamo no Mae. The fortuneteller said that if the woman were killed, the illness would be cured, and he explained her origins as follows:

She was an eight-hundred-year-old, two-tailed fox, from the Nasuno Plain in Shimotsuke Province, and in a previous existence she had been the fox, the Tsuka-gami, worshiped by King Hansoku in the Ninn6 Sutra. She had, as that fox, inveigled King Hansoku into bringing the heads of a thousand kings, but had been deprived of her desire through the power of Buddhism, and thus had become an enemy of Buddhism. Through her cycle of existence she would always be born as a fox. She would then appear as a queen or a servant lady or a courtier at the courts of countries where Buddhism flourished, approach the king, and, taking his life, endeavor to have herself installed as the king of the land; such was her pledge of revenge. She thus became the empress of the Chinese emperor Yu Wang of the Chou dynasty, and after causing his decline she came to Japan, where she wasborn as the fox of the Nasuno Plain. She transformed herself into Tamamo no Mae and planned to destroy the Buddhist law, kill the emperor and become ruler of Japan herself. This was the story as told by Abe no Yasunari.

Thus a special onmyōdō ceremony was held, and she was made to perform the role of shamaness. At the point where the magical text had been about half completed, she disappeared. Thus the court commanded two Eastern warriors, Kazusa no Suke Hirotsune and Miwa no Suke Yoshiaki, to kill the fox. The two of them trained tracking dogs, polished up their fox-hunting skills, and, with the idea that even demons should follow the imperial law, prayed for the help of the deities and set off for the Nasuno Plain, where they conquered the fox. They deposited the rare treasures that appeared from various parts of the fox's body in appropriate temples and houses, and they sent the white needle to Yoritomo, who was then sent into exile to the province of Izu."

Quoted from: "The World of Genpei Jōsuiki" by Shigekatsu Minobe in the Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2/3, Religion and Literature in Japan (Jun. - Sep., 1982), pp. 226-227.