Tenjin
Japanese · mortal · heian · Recorded classification
The clearest case anywhere of a god created by bad conscience. A court destroys a man politically, he dies in exile, lightning then kills the people who destroyed him, and the state's response is not to deny the connection but to concede it — restoring his rank, building him a shrine, and eventually making him a kami of the first rank, in the hope that he will stop. The Japanese term for it is goryō, the placation of an angry ghost by promotion, and Michizane is its type case. That he ended up as the patron of examinations, which is what he was good at, is the tradition's own joke.
Domains
- scholarship
- thunder
- vengeance
Sources
- Sugawara no Michizane (845-903) was exiled to Dazaifu by a Fujiwara rival and died there; the calamities that followed were attributed to his spirit, and he was posthumously restored, shrined and in 987 deified as Tenjin, kami of scholarship and calligraphy.: Reference treatments of Sugawara no Michizane, his exile, the calamities and his deification as Tenjin. (secondary)