The Grave-Eater
Imperial China (the Han tombs at Luoyang and Chang'an) · Zhou through Han, the state exorcism record
The state had a name for it. The state had a method against it. The name and the method were entered, in the second century before the present era, in the Zhouli, the manual of rites by which the imperial household ordered its calendar and its tombs. The name was wangliang. The method was the fangxiangshi.
The records of the tombs at Luoyang and at Chang’an describe the same fear. A grave was sealed at the close of the day. A coffin was lowered. The earth was filled in over it. By the morning, in cases that recurred often enough for the state to register the pattern, the seals were intact and the body within was not.
On the creature
The accounts of the wangliang converge across the centuries.
The creature was the size of a child of three. The skin was the colour of old liver. The eyes were red. The ears were long enough to fold flat against the cheeks. The mouth was wide. The hands were the hands of a small ape and were strong. The accounts insist that the creature did not enter the tomb from above. The creature came up through the soft earth at the foot of the coffin, in the dark of the sealed chamber, and worked the lid from beneath.
The records say the creature ate the liver first.
The order is given consistently. The liver was taken first, and the heart second, and the spleen and the stomach and the kidneys in an order the texts do not always agree on, and the lungs at the last. The bones were not taken. The skin was not taken. The face was not taken. The records of the funeral specialists of the Han period describe the morning recovery of a violated coffin as the work of a single observation: the skin of the body had been replaced over the empty cage of the ribs, the face had been smoothed back into the pillow, the cloths had been re-folded, and the coffin lid had been set down again from within.
By morning the body inside had no soft organs left. Only a clean cage of ribs and the skin pulled back over the face.
On the rite of the four-eyed officiant
The Zhouli specifies the officiant.
The fangxiangshi was a man of the imperial household, appointed to the office for life. He wore the skin of a bear over his head and shoulders, the head of the bear set above his own. Over his face he wore a bronze mask cast with four eyes, two above and two below, the eyes inlaid with white shell. In his right hand he carried a ge, the dagger-axe of the warrior. In his left he carried a shield. He was followed, in the great processions, by twelve attendants in red.
His office at a burial was specific. Before the coffin was lowered into the open pit, the fangxiangshi descended into the pit alone. He stood at the centre. He struck the four corners of the pit with the ge, in the order north, south, east, west. He drove out whatever had come up through the soft earth. He climbed out. The coffin was then lowered.
The accounts of the Han funeral specialists describe a second precaution. A stone tiger, life-sized, was set at the entrance of the tomb avenue. A pair of arborvitae trees was planted at either side of the spirit road. The wangliang, the texts say, was held in particular dread of the tiger and would not pass the planted line of the arborvitae. The avenues of the imperial tombs at Mangshan, north of Luoyang, were laid out in this manner, and the stone tigers, the records say, have remained at their posts.
On what was buried
The accounts do not say the tombs were not entered. The accounts say the tombs were entered less often, and less completely, where the rite of the fangxiangshi had been performed and the stone tigers had been set in place. In the tombs of provincial officials, where the rite had been performed by deputies and the trees had not been planted, the record of intact bodies is poorer. The funeral specialists of the late Han, in the entries that survive in the commentaries, describe themselves as opening, in the course of a re-interment, coffins that had been sealed a generation earlier and finding within them only the cage of the ribs and the smoothed face and the carefully re-folded cloth.
The archive holds no position on the creature. The archive holds no position on the office. The archive observes only that the state had named the fear, and had appointed a man with a bronze mask of four eyes to descend into the open pit before the coffin was lowered, and that the avenues of the imperial tombs were laid out with stone tigers at their entrances, and that the funeral specialists of the Han, who opened the older coffins, had reasons for the precautions they preserved.
The fangxiangshi, when the Han fell, did not. The office passed into the Nuo, the great year-end exorcism, and the bronze mask survived into the medieval period, and a version of the mask is held in the storerooms of the National Museum at Beijing and is not on display.
- Zhouli [Rites of Zhou], Xiaguan Sima section, Fangxiangshi entry. Compiled in the Warring States period, second century BCE. The earliest state-ritual specification of the four-eyed exorcist and the wangliang against which he was deployed.
- Li Shizhen. Bencao Gangmu [Compendium of Materia Medica], section on wangliang. Nanjing: Hu Chenglong, 1596. The Ming pharmacopoeia entry describing the creature as a tomb-dweller that consumed the livers of the dead.
- Bodde, Derk. Festivals in Classical China: New Year and Other Annual Observances during the Han Dynasty, 206 B.C.-A.D. 220. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Chapter four treats the Great Exorcism, the Nuo, and the role of the fangxiangshi within it.