II. The Stars

In the talisman books of late Meiji and early Taishō Japan, the night sky was a working reference. Its stars had names, offices, and days of the calendar on which they came down to inspect the living — and each could be addressed with a talisman.

At the center of this sky stands the pole star, the one point that does not move. East Asian religion gave it many identities; in Japan it was worshipped above all as Myōken, a bodhisattva of the pole star whose medieval cult, historians have shown, was concerned with the length of human life.

This chapter draws on two public-domain books:

The Northern Dipper. The seven stars of the Dipper, each with its own talisman, from the Tenteison-sei reifu himitsu shūden (“Secret Collected Transmission of the Talismans of the Venerated Star of the Celestial Emperor,” 1910). We reproduce the first star, Donrō, the Greedy Wolf (p. 228), and the seventh, Hagun, the Army Breaker (p. 240).

The twenty-eight lodges. The stations of the moon’s monthly path around the sky, each given a star map above and a talisman in seal-like script below (1910, pp. 242–298).

The Seventy-Two. The house-quieting talismans (Chintaku Reifu) of a manual published in 1912, the first year of the Taishō era — seventy-two talismans for seventy-two household troubles, from a ringing cooking pot to a dog climbing onto the floor. See the collection.