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Sep. 28th, 2007 04:23 pmMy head is full of foxes. Also, the major drawback to reading all these books on Asian fox spirits is that the authors keep mentioning these wonderful stories, which are all in books written in languages I can't read.
In Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative, which I'm reading totally out of order, the author mentions that Chinese foxes often threw roof-tiles at people when haunting houses, from which she extrapolates that falling roof tiles were a common problem in Chinese houses. :) (and also mentions that roofs are liminal spaces, boundaries between the outside and inside.)
What I find fascinating is the commonalities between Western and Eastern things - houses haunted by foxes often have the same phenomena as poltergeists in Europe, and mediums could be either possessed by foxes or hold seances in which people and things behaved in ways that would have been completely familiar to any turn-of-the-last-century Spiritualist medium.
In Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative, which I'm reading totally out of order, the author mentions that Chinese foxes often threw roof-tiles at people when haunting houses, from which she extrapolates that falling roof tiles were a common problem in Chinese houses. :) (and also mentions that roofs are liminal spaces, boundaries between the outside and inside.)
What I find fascinating is the commonalities between Western and Eastern things - houses haunted by foxes often have the same phenomena as poltergeists in Europe, and mediums could be either possessed by foxes or hold seances in which people and things behaved in ways that would have been completely familiar to any turn-of-the-last-century Spiritualist medium.
