Religion and the Violent Outsider: Demons and Warriors
In several manuscripts, too, it is possible to find brief mention of a new type of deity associated with a tutelary role guarding the fortunes of walled communities, a sort of god already attested in one eighth-century anecdote.[677] Such deities became common in the new age that followed the tenth century, and can be construed as continuing the long-standing cults of dead heroes that had been recognised by earlier dynastic authorities.
Now, however, there seems to be on occasion a readiness to recognise the cults of dead generals, a category formerly avoided in favour of heroes displaying more civic virtues. In one case we are told that the tutelary figure had been a military leader of an indigenous ethnic group who in life had proved a loyal friend to the Chinese.[678] Possibly the expansion of a burgeoning population of Chinese speakers into alien territories prompted fear of reprisals that made dead warriors a more acceptable form of divine patron, even if in the long run such city gods became no more than the unseen world's counterpart of the local civil mandarin. Similar fears over the religious practices of alien peoples newly encountered may also lie behind some of the tales of human sacrifice that appear in our sources under the new Song dynasty.[679]The most powerful enemies of the Song period Chinese lay, however, on their northern borders. From the start of the dynasty the Kitan in the northeast presented formidable problems, until the sudden appearance of the Jurchen ancestors of the Manchus, who by 1125 had overthrown the Kitan and by 1126 ejected the Chinese from the whole of north China. After they were in turn overthrown in 1234 by the Mongols, the resistance of the southern Chinese to these new enemies managed to maintain their southern capital until 1276, but after its fall the days of the dynasty were effectively numbered.
Such a sustained period of armed state-state confrontation naturally had profound effects on the conduct of warfare, especially in the development of military technologies such as the use of gunpowder. These developments were not without consequence in the religious sphere, and in fact it is possible in one instance to suspect a change in religious iconography before any clear records in military sources. This concerns the use of gunpowder to fire projectiles, something not clearly attested either in writing or by the archaeological retrieval of actual examples of cannon until after the appearance of the Mongols. Even so, a sculpture of a group of weaponcarrying demons that has been dated to 1128 has been interpreted as showing one carrying a firearm.[680]But the use of pyrotechnics in religious contexts may have gone beyond mere representation. A close reading of Daoist texts of the period on Thunder Magic, a procedure perhaps derived perhaps from the sorcery of southern peoples but one that was taken up and improved especially by mandarins anxious to have the ritual means at their disposal to overawe indigenous opposition, suggests that sufficient quantities of gunpowder were incorporated into exorcisms to blow apart the shrines of their opponents. Evidently recourse to violence, including technologically enhanced violence, was seen as legitimate in both the seen and the unseen realms. No shift of perspective was in fact required, for we know that the troops of the Jurchen armies were regarded as demons, as were the Mongols somewhat later, and eventually the Manchu armies facing the nineteenth-century Taiping rebels: the elision between ‘foreigner invader' and ‘demon', as we have already seen, goes back centuries.[681] Whether the Jurchen troops considered the Song armies demonic we do not know, but it would seem that the rise of one of the most formidable warrior gods of late imperial China, Zhenwu, was prompted by his worship by the Jurchen military before he attracted adherents among the Song Chinese, so it may be that these notions were shared between opposing camps.[682] Since Zhenwu had already performed a minor role in the Daoist pantheon in earlier times there was no problem with accepting him as a recognised deity, but some other cases illustrate the way in which popular and often quite ferocious gods, while expected to conform to norms approved by the state, might also reflect non-state understandings of their role.
The plague god Marshal Wen, for instance, while possessing red hair, green skin and tusks, suggesting that he was originally understood as a demon, did become acceptable as a Daoist deity once stories were circulated variously explaining away his appearance as due to a joke gone wrong, or his self-sacrificial ingestion of plague agents.[683] For just as successful bandits might be co-opted into imperial forces, so demons too might make a like transition to join the forces of law and order in the spirit world. Similarly, though the state was reluctant to recognise gods in non-human form other than the impeccably imperial dragon, one exception seems to have been made for a white ape, a figure that was certainly anthropoid but that was also associated with the martial arts.[684]