Fox-Girl Legends

 The composite oracle poster joining I Ching 64 and Tarot Major Arcana 17, prompted a search for fox-girl figures. Conductive inference moves through information, finding a path as it goes, more like crossing a stream with two stones, rather than building a bridge. It is a way but not a method. My juxtaposition  suggested there could be a hybrid joining the two beings, an intuition confirmed by a search, identifying an ancient legend and tradition of tales in Asian folklore of the Fox-Girl shapeshifter trickster character.

Kitsune is a shapeshifting trickster fox woman from Japanese folklore whose character and personality resembles the crafty, playful, elusive, clever fox from the wild. She is a type of yōkai, a class of magical creature with paranormal powers. She often has two different sides: sometimes she is a benevolent deity associated with the gift of the rice harvest, while at other times, Kitsune is depicted as a demon or ghoul-like mischievous trickster who questions traditional female gender roles, seducing men in plots that frequently end in tragedy or bloodshed.

T-Shirt Fox-Girl

This playful Fox Woman character weaves her way throughout Asia and is known as Kumiho in Korea, Hồ Ly Tinh or Cáo Chín Đuôi (nine-tailed fox) in Vietnam, and Huli Jing in China. Variations on the Fox Woman theme and story also show up in folklore from Ireland as Sionnach Sidhe (a seductive fox fairy with ginger red hair who is fox by night and woman by day) and in Scandinavia she can show up as a Huldra, a supernatural creature and keeper of the forest who is a female from the front, but with a fox tail from the back. In Finland she makes her way across the sky leaving behind a luminous* trail, also known as the northern lights, referred to in Finnish as Revontulet translated as “Fox Fire”. Among the Inuit of Labrador, Canada, she shows up as a Fox Wife. Though each of these landscapes has its own unique version of the Fox Woman story, what ties them all together is some combination of the following qualities: the ambiguity of her shifting identity between human and fox; her supernatural qualities; her power; her association with nature and the wild; her sexually seductive behavior and her sometimes androgynous identity.

 My immediate response was to look into how this legend might be represented in contemporary Manga and Animé works. Nor surprisingly there are numerous versions. Raya is into Japanese pop culture, so a side-benefit was an idea for her birthday gift next month. I settled on one series, Tamamo-chan's a Fox, to sample the story. It is about a Kitsune from a Kyoto temple shrine who wants to experience high school, so she shapeshifts into a freshman girl, which fools the teachers but not her peers. This character is from the good side of the legend, and maybe will interest Raya who starts HS next year. Meanwhile, I need to follow up on this legend, to learn what path it is indicating for my beginning again.