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Father: true desires, projection theory, and related thoughts (Part 1-1)
[Part 1-1] [Part 1-2]
Wow, another Father theory/thoughts post from yours truly. Who could’ve predicted that???? /s
Huge manga spoilers ahead, obviously.
In this post, I will be expanding on some concepts I touched on in my two-parter Goryoujin thoughts from way back in August (god, it’s been a hot minute) - specifically the parts about the nature of Father’s wish and Father’s “double meaning” lines, as I had described them in the post. If you haven’t read the Goryoujin thoughts post and Additional Thoughts on 89-2 (both of which can be found in my pinned), I strongly urge you to do so as I build a little on my previous words and concepts introduced in those posts.
This theory/thoughts post will be divided into two sections:
Part 1: True Wish theory, leading into
Part 2: Projection theory
I will be making several references and taking quotations from the book Matsuri: Festivals of Japan by Herbert E. Plutschow as it was very informative for some of the subjects I will be touching on.
Special thanks to Raelin and Jowi for helping me make this post happen - both with editing and helping me cohesively formulate my ideas!
Without much further ado, let’s begin.
Dated: April 11, 2021 || Part 1 Wordcount: 4250~
Part 1: “True Wish” theory
The baseline of the theory: Although Father’s wish is indeed to “cull the herd”, the desire Yato was born from - and which manifests in his inherent kind and caring nature that we see in the Sakura flashbacks - was an entirely different one from the wish Father is vocalizing. This theory assumes that Yato is exactly what we have been told so far: a small god born from Father’s one powerful wish.
(This concept was originally brought up by Noragami theory god @echodrops in their “A Lot of Thoughts on Yato and Father” analysis. I’m simply expanding on the ideas proposed by them.)
Before we go any further, I want to talk about the two main “aspects” of Japanese deities and spirits:
Aramitama (lit. “wild soul”): the chaotic, malevolent, violent aspect of a spirit, which must be pacified and worshiped in order to give rise to the nigimitama. When the aramitama emerges, natural disasters and social disorder follow.
Nigimitama (lit. “tranquil soul”): the orderly, civilized aspect of a spirit when they are properly worshiped and placated, the “normal” state of deities. Deities in their nigimitama state bring good harvests and protection from disasters.
(Side note: This is exemplary of what Amaterasu meant when she said “Harmony has been held in the highest regard since ancient times. Which is also to say that discord is wickedness.” in Chapter 70.)
To quote Matsuri:
“Generally speaking, deities seem to be, in most cases, ethically indifferent. Their beneficent and maleficent potential seems to derive from their contacts with the living. If people fail to worship them in a way pleasing to the deities, then they will turn malevolent and cause natural disasters and social disharmony. Once malevolent, the deities will not change unless people ritually change their nature. There seems to be no absolutely evil deities in Japan.” (Pg. 20 - Kindle edition)
There are two points of importance in this passage to the two theories of this post: (1) it falls to the people to pacify the raging spirits which cause disaster in a way that is pleasing to the deities, and (2) there are no inherently evil deities in Japan as all spirits have a dynamic ara- and orderly nigi- aspect. For now, I want to focus on the first point.
➞ Father’s grudge
In a chapter titled “The Man-Deity Totality”, Plutschow provides an interesting insight into the relationship between man and deity in pre-modern Japan:
“Deities relate intimately both to the land and to the human community upon it. [...] Natural calamities and social disruption are believed to result from a deity’s evil or from a vengeful deity that comes out of its dynamic aspect. Men and deities are therefore reflections of the other, each partaking of the nature of the other. Man and deities form a whole, by which a person’s ontic self and his behavior are linked to the deity.” (Pg 25 - Kindle edition)
It asserts that the state of the deity reflects the state of the community, and the state of the community reflects on the deity; that is to say, when the deity is orderly, the community prospers and is also orderly, and when the deity takes on the dynamic ara- aspect, everything else does as well.
If we look back to Chapter 60:
“Your ilk get off scot-free for everything you do. But who do you think forgives the debt? People do. No matter how much you take from them, how much you walk all over them. They just accept it without a word of complaint. I can’t forgive any of you - not the gods or any of the idiots who forgive them. [People are] like little children who do nothing but cry and cling to their parents… no matter how much of a beating those parents give them. You say this is the world that men and gods all wanted… and that makes me… want to shake things up!”
Father’s grudge has two aspects to it:
- The gods: Emboldened and made arrogant by humanity's continued "forgiveness" of their actions, the gods can do whatever they want to the Near Shore without much consequence; natural disasters and calamities seem to have the opposite effect - they further deepen humanity's faith, no doubt in an effort to placate the raging spirits in times of strife.
(Chapter 87)
(Chapter 70)
Without the faith of the people, gods would not exist, as gods are sustained through human wishes and desires.
- The people: Humanity is directly complicit in allowing gods to do whatever they please and crawling back to them “like little children.” The burden of making sure the deity’s nigimitama is worshiped, disaster is avoided, and order is maintained falls mostly to the people. Yet, if the deity and the people are reflections of each other and form a cohesive whole, "each partaking in the nature of the other", then the system is the way it is because humanity - much like gods - are slaves to their nature, which is inherently "ugly" according to Father.
[”But it is not long past that [Tenjin] became a god, and his attachment to the world of men remains strong. He is a slave to his divine nature; he cannot fight against it.” - Tsuyu (Chapter 47, official trans.)]
[”No matter how well you cover it up, once you expose their true selves... well, you know what happens then very well. Human nature is an ugly thing.” - Father (Chapter 49, official trans.)]
Father cites his motivations to "cull the herd" as a way to get rid of the gods but also as a motivation - because all people have that ugly human nature within them, their karma. ("That's why I told you to cull the herd.")
(Chapter 48)
Karma is a Buddhist concept: to put it simply, it is the sum of one's conscious actions. Negative karma - like we see in the revealing of God's Greatest Secret - arises from the Three Poisons (greed - craving/desire, hatred - aversion/ aggression, and delusion - ignorance about the Buddhist concept of reality, which asserts that everything is ever-changing and the self is an illusion; attachment to the physical world and desire are the cause of all suffering and the thing that keeps all beings trapped within samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth caused by karma).
To summarize: the gods and humans, in Father's eyes, are equally complicit in perpetuating this endless cycle - because the people and the deities are reflections of each other, the inherent "ugliness" of human nature reflects on gods to give rise to their ara- aspect. This creates a need for the constant pacification which, within the context of Noragami, is the "forgiveness" of humanity, the thing which enables the gods to do as they please - painting people as both the perpetrators (being slaves to their "ugly" human nature) and the victims.
Father's solution to this constant, continued loop is to "cull the herd": to get rid of the people whose faith sustains the existence of gods and, at the same time, enables their destructive behavior due to their own human nature as Father perceives it. He describes his wish like so:
"Yaboku, you are a tiny god born from only one wish. But it's a very powerful wish, the only wish I've been able to wish in my entire life. My wish is this: a cull."
(Chapter 47, official trans.)
Yato supplements this statement with the following in the Heaven arc:
"The culling of humanity is the Sorcerer’s wish. [...] Because gods are immortal. As long as people exist, so, too, will the gods.”
(Chapter 70)
(Side note: "culling" the herd implies the selective slaughter of “inferior” livestock, not total annihilation, so I have no idea why it's implied that Father wants to get rid of all people several times yet his wish is described as “culling” the herd.)
➞ The catch
“Those who learn from successes grow prideful. On the contrary… those who learn from failures run to extremes. You can’t learn anything from total affirmation or total denial.” - Tenjin, Chapter 66 (official trans.)
As I've discussed briefly in Part 2 of the Goryoujin post, the exact wording of Father's description of his wish strikes me as very odd:
"The only wish I've been able to wish in my entire life."
It's a small detail, easily overlooked, but the more you think about it, the stranger it becomes. The only thing Father has been able to wish in his entire life: the annihilation of humanity and thus, the gods?
If “cull the herd” is indeed Father’s one true, constant wish throughout his entire life, then that implies Father has felt that way since he was very young in some capacity. I have a very hard time visualizing a, say, ten year old Father sitting there and wishing for mass murder. “People have an inherent ugly human nature which manifests in their bad deeds and karma” and “the gods are destructive, their destructive-ness being further enabled by people’s forgiveness of their actions” to “obviously, killing everyone (or almost everyone) to get rid of the gods is a Viable Solution” is a very, very big leap to make, and definitely not a very realistic or rational one. Is it theoretically possible? Yes. Likely? Probably not. So what happened?
Father very likely (99%-sure kind of “likely”) had a very religiously-involved past. As mentioned earlier, karma is a Buddhist concept, the very core of Buddhist ethics and what drives the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth (samsara) and thus, suffering - and it’s far from being the only Buddhist association with Father. Everything from his clothes in the Sakura flashback (the black Buddhist motsuke koromo over a white kosode, the basic attire of a monk) to the terminology he uses (“karma”, “Liberation” for Chiki’s powers, which alludes to the Buddhist concept of freeing oneself from samsara) to even Chiki herself, who becomes a staff known as a khakkhara or shakujo (JP), Father’s having six rings to represent the Six Realms in which someone can be reborn into, depending on their karma.
(A khakkhara/shakujo)
Although our concept of “Shinto” and “Buddhism” today might be that they are two totally separate religions, this wasn’t the case for much of Japanese history since Buddhism was introduced to Japan in the Asuka period (538 - 710). Although they do have many distinctions between them in both mythological tradition, beliefs, and structural practice, the imported Buddhism blended and merged with the native Shinto faith so much that it’s difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends: temples (tera) were often built alongside shrines (jinja) and Shinto & Buddhist deities were many times enshrined together at the same places. One such example is Kyoto’s Gion shrine - today known as Yasaka shrine - which enshrines the Shinto deity Susanoo and, in the past, Gozu Tenno, a deity of Buddhist origin. Both are believed to cause plagues but can also protect against them if worshiped properly.
(Yasaka shrine)
This blending of Shinto and Buddhism was called shinbutsu shuugo, “the syncretism of kami and buddha”, and was definitely true of Father’s time around 1000 - 1100 years ago (middle Heian period, around 900).
Now, it isn’t necessarily required to pray to any Buddhist divinity in the conventional sense besides chanting mantras and sutras (it does depend on the school, though), the focus is more on liberation from samsara (and the means to achieve it are many, again depending on the school) and seeing the world as it really is, in accordance with Buddhist thought. Yet it’s very strange to me how - with these close ties that Buddhism has to Shinto and vice versa - Father claims to have only ever had this one wish to cull the herd, despite probably living for some chunk of time in this highly religious environment as a monk and having Buddhist teachings drilled into his head.
Buddhism generally doesn’t view human nature as inherently “ugly” (in fact, there is no concept of “human nature” in Buddhism because the self - and therefore everything that makes up the self - is an illusion and temporary; the only thing that remains is one’s karma, the sum of one’s actions); in fact, it’s the exact opposite. Sentient beings are thought to have “buddha-nature” and therefore are inherently good, thus the taboo on taking lives, which causes harm. Doing any amount of research into basic Buddhist concepts - the Four Noble Truths, Three Poisons, the Eightfold Path, the Six Perfections - will reveal that the avoidance of harm and the active doing of good is a central theme in Buddhism, a theme Father doesn’t adhere to (at all), among a plethora of other Buddhist concepts he is the very opposite of. Yet it’s clear that Buddhist thought informed very strongly what Father believes and how he sees the world, given the visual cues, the way he talks, and the terms he throws around.
I am hesitant to believe Father has always rejected these concepts, taking into consideration how extreme Father’s views are. It seems he has spent quite a while as a monk, given the glimpse we got into his thorough knowledge of astrology as based on the Chinese system - knowledge that was certainly limited only to literate and educated men, a privilege most people did not have.
(To quote from Volume 16 notes: “Kanoto to Tori, page 98
“Yato’s father is demonstrating his knowledge of astronomy as based on the Chinese system. Kanoto is the Japanese for xin, the eight of the ten Heavenly Stems, and Tori is the tenth of the twelve Earthly Branches (the Rooster or Bird of the zodiac). These stems and branches were used in the Chinese (and subsequently Japanese) calendar to count years in a cycle of 60. The 58th year in the cycle, Kanoto-Tori year, was known to be one of revolutionary change, so when little Yaboku reached out to a star connecting Kanoto and Tori, his father took that as a sign.”)
This would indicate a process of turning away from these beliefs, a gradual corruption - an increasingly jaded view of the world, not a constant and unchanging belief. The existence of a jaded train of thought implies the existence of an unjaded, untarnished one in the past - and, in Father’s case - this unjaded, untarnished desire gave rise to “cull the herd”, a wish arising from Father’s cynical worldviews, shaped by his experiences of gods and, likely, people as well over some period of time.
A pure and sincere desire transformed and twisted into something monstrous is certainly not something we haven’t seen in Noragami before:
In Bishamon’s love for her shinki and her desire for a family, which turned into blind and irrational hatred towards Yato and created a destructive, painful, and lonely environment for her shinki family, respectively;
(Chapter 19)
(Chapter 21)
In Kazuma’s desire to protect and stay with Bishamon, which led him to more and more desperate lengths;
(Chapter 67)
(Chapter 55)
Even in Kugaha’s scheming - his desire for Bishamon’s love and affection gave rise to his plans to replace her, under the guise of “righteousness”.
(Chapter 22. Not included here is the “All of you kept smiling for me. But deep down I knew that you were weeping.” panel with Kugaha smiling because the scans I’m looking at don’t have it. Grr.)
Father’s case, obviously, is this concept taken to the pinnacles of “extreme.” Yet I would argue that Kugaha’s case is most similar to Father’s in both desperation and motivation: there is a lot to be said about the comparison of gods to parents and to humans as children, even Father makes this comparison himself.
(Chapter 60)
Noragami has certainly made it a point to show how painful it is to be abandoned by one’s parents and community, whether they be god-parents or birth family.
(Chapter 14)
(Chapter 88)
I’m going to go one step further and apply this theme to Father, a being “abandoned by the Heavens”, as he says in his own words:
(Chapter 76)
I won’t delve too much into this application just yet as this has a lot to do with the Projection theory, which I will explore in detail in Part 2; for now, just know this is the viewpoint I’m working with when I talk about this particular theory.
So, to bring it all back to the original point: if Father’s wish to “cull the herd” is the wish arising from his jaded view of the world formed over some period of years, what is the unjaded, true desire it arose from that’s been a constant in his life - the desire that Yato embodies in his divine nature, taking into consideration the pain of abandonment by your (god-)parents and community?
[Continued in Part 1-2]