From Deer Bones to Turtle Shells: The State Ritualization of Pyro-Plastromancy during the Nara-Heian Transition

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The earliest known description of divination performed on the Japanese archipelago comes from the Waren zhuan ??? (Traditions of the people of Wa) of the late third century ce Sanguo zhi (Chronicles of the three kingdoms). This relatively short compilation of traditions or transmissions describes the lands and customs of a foreign people named Wa thought to inhabit parts of the southern Japanese archipelago during the third century ce. It states that the Wa customarily performed divination with fire and bones:...They scorch for cracks, using them to prognosticate auspiciousness and inauspiciousness. The initial declaration of what is to be cracked resembles words used in charging the methods, [methods] which involve the careful observation of fire-produced fissures to prognosticate [the auspiciousness and inauspiciousness of ] crack omens.1 (Sanguo zhi 3: 30, 856)Because the divinatory practices of the people of Wa are said to involve bones and resemble Chinese charging the methods, there is good reason to argue that the passage is referring to something other than divination with turtle shells. Received and recovered evidence can be used to defend and expand on this point.Archaeologist Kanzawa Yuichi's (1987, 6) oft-cited work on early Japanese bone divination lists 158 divined and shells from thirty-four different sites. The list includes seventy-five deer bones, twenty-one wild boar bones, forty-six dolphin bones, and four loggerhead turtle (akawamigame ??????) plastrons ranging in date from roughly 100 bce to 800 ce. Ninety-eight examples are dated to the Yayoi (ca. 300 bce-250 ce) period, seventeen to the Kofun (ca. 250-538), and forty-seven to the Nara (710-784) period. Only about half of the total are deer scapulae, but they are found at a majority of the listed sites (26/34), indicating widespread use of deer for divination before the Nara period. Kanzawa's list includes only four examples of turtle shells: three late Kofun plastrons from the Maguchi Cavern ??? ruins on the Miura Peninsula in Kanagawa, and one late Kofun to early Nara plastron from the Shitaru ??? ruins in northwest Tsushima.A more recent list of archaeologically recovered divined turtle shells compiled by Saso (2006, 105) adds twenty-seven late Kofun to early Nara examples from six different sites. A vast majority of these shells postdate 600 ce and come from the present-day prefectures of Kanagawa, Chiba, and Nagasaki (including Tsushima and Iki). According to the temporal distribution of the shells in Saso's survey, pyro-plastromancy came to be practiced just as frequently as pyroscapulimancy by the early eighth century of the Common Era.The archaeological record, as it stands today, indicates that the most common pyromantic media in Japan were deer until, or shortly before, the Nara period, when turtle shells start to appear just as frequently. Received Japanese court-sponsored texts, however, suggest a late Nara or early Heian shift from to shells. Deer-bone pyro-scapulimancy (rokuboku ??) is portrayed as the standard technique for royal and divine divinatory consultations in the early Nara Kojiki (Record of ancient matters) and Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan), and in other early mytho-histories like the Kujiki ??? (Chronicle of ancient things). Pyro-plastromancy (kiboku ??; turtle-shell cracking [with fire]) is never mentioned in these works, but it is clearly the dominant form of divinatory cracking in early Heian court-sponsored historical and bureaucratic texts such as:1. Shoku Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan continued) [ca. 797 ce]2. Ryo no gige (Explanations of the codes and ceremonies) [ca. 833]3. Nihon koki (Later chronicle of Japan) [ca. 840]4. Shoku Nihon koki (Later chronicle of Japan continued) [ca. 869]5. Nihon Montoku tenno jitsuroku (The veritable records of Montoku of Japan) [ca. …