Book Report Fox Magic: Handbook of Chinese Witchcraft and Alchemy in the Fox Tradition

[Xingtian]

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

The author, Jason Read, has been trained in the Mao Shan school of Daoism. All the Daoist schools practice magic but Mao Shan has the reputation of being the Daoist sorcerers. Solid information on Daoist magical practice is very rare in English, and Jason Read's series of books provide an unprecedented amount of practical information. This particular book tackles the subject of fox magic which is of particular interest to me. Whatever critiques might be made of this book (and I'll get to that) there is nothing to compete with it. Alex Anatole's The Tao of Celestial Foxes manages to be much longer and more verbose yet somehow less informative that this short volume.

There is really zero fluff in this book. He does begin with a section of Chinese lore about fox-fairies with an overview of the shamanic roots and several short tales, but this is important for those unfamiliar with the place of foxes in Chinese popular imagination. He also talks about how the fox cult moved to Japan and developed there, especially in interaction with a particular tantric Buddhist school. To round off the background section, there is some interesting speculation about possible connections of the Chinese fox cult to the dakinis of Indian tantric lore, with foxes standing in for the charnel jackals as jackals aren't really found in China. Read generally does a good job of distinguishing his opinions and speculations from what he has been taught.

The meat of the book is in the rituals. Some of the basic talismans he refers to are detailed in his other book but generally he gives step-by-step practical instructions including materials, altar layout, etc. For incantations he gives English translations, sometimes together with Pinyin transliteration. He also provides pictures of talismans from what I presume is his personal grimoire, which help illustrate what he's talking about. For those unfamiliar, Chinese "talismans" (fu) are usually written on paper with a combination of stylized characters, lines, and other bits, organized in a certain way to call on certain spirits for specific purposes.

Fox magic is most commonly associated with seduction, glamor, and other kinds of influence, and most of the rituals are geared toward that. However Read also provides a translation of a portion of the

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

(The Fox Fairy's Scripture of Gold Rules and Jade Precepts) which is an Orthodox Daoist scripture meant for ritual recitation, and has a decidedly more "elevated" concern with cultivation and enlightenment, though he omits the longer, more moralistic sections at the end of this text.

The book is in bad need of an editor. Formatting, spelling, etc. are all over the place. The book is still very readable but sometimes it takes a moment to distinguish between where a translated text ends and the author's commentary begins.

The author does not pretend to be a scholar and this book is aimed squarely at aspiring practitioners. Nonetheless in this age where many sources are readily available to average people, I think a book like this would be made all the more helpful by citing sources or pointing to further reading (other than the author's other books). Even if the only sources are in Chinese it can be useful for those of more advanced knowledge to be able to refer to them. A lot of the knowledge comes from oral instruction received by the author but much else can be traced to textual sources. For example, the story of Gong Xueli given at the beginning is a well-known tale from Pu Songling, whose Liaozhai stories became so popular that they are practically folklore- nonetheless, they are a literary source, not just a tale circulating by mouth. Some of the incantations are given in Pinyin but with no marks for tones- this might not matter though if the chanting is done in a monotone. It would also be good IMO to include the Chinese versions of the incantations. This will likely not be useful to most readers but for those who read a bit it's helpful to be able to compare the text and translation.

So with those quibbles aside, much of the information in this book has never appeared in English before and is well worth a glance for those interested in Daoism or Chinese occult practices in general.