Vengeful Spirit and Saint: Who Enshrined the Dead Cast Out by Power?
Why Sugawara no Michizane became a vengeful spirit and Thomas Becket a saint, and the part the living played
When exam season arrives in Japan, students crowd the Tenmangu shrines dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane, the god of learning. For centuries, the same Michizane was also held responsible for the early death of a crown prince and for the lightning that struck the imperial palace. A patron of scholarship and a vengeful ghost, in one figure.
Set an Englishman beside him, and something interesting comes into view.
His name is Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.
On 29 December 1170, four knights close to King Henry II killed him inside his own cathedral.
Both men were raised to the center of power, and both were stripped of their place there by conflict with that power. Michizane was removed from the office of Minister of the Right and sent to Dazaifu in Kyushu. Becket kept the title of archbishop but was pushed into exile abroad.
Both had their tombs become centers of devotion after death. And in both cases, the very power that had driven them out later helped establish the cult.
What followed diverged sharply. Michizane was enshrined through a set of overlapping frames: onryo, the vengeful spirit; goryo, the august spirit that must be placated; tenjin, the heavenly deity. Becket was venerated as martyr and saint. The starting points looked alike, but the names given to the dead, and the places they took inside institutions, parted ways.
What separated them was not only how they died. It was who recorded the death, who named it, and who enshrined it. This piece follows that question of who.
Chapter 1. Two men driven out by power
Sugawara no Michizane was born in 845 into a family of scholars. He earned the trust of Emperor Uda and rose to Minister of the Right. In 901, amid factional conflict at court, he was accused of plotting rebellion and demoted to Dazaifu in Kyushu. He died there two years later, in 903.
Thomas Becket served Henry II as chancellor before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162. After taking office he clashed with the king over the jurisdiction of church courts, fled to France in 1164, and spent six years abroad. He returned in 1170 under a reconciliation, and was killed at the end of that year.
Both were elevated to the center of power, then lost their footing through conflict with it. The deaths differ. Michizane died of illness in the place he had been sent to. Becket was cut down inside his cathedral after coming home.
What happened after their deaths brings them back together.
In 905, a disciple of Michizane named Umasake no Yasuyuki built a memorial hall over his grave. Dazaifu Tenmangu treats this as the shrine’s beginning. Note the sequence: Fujiwara no Tokihira, his rival at court, died in 909, and the lightning strike on the Seiryoden hall that was later blamed on Michizane’s curse came in 930. The memorial hall came first.
In other words, worship at the grave began a full quarter century before the lightning of 930 that would later be read as his curse. The hall was raised by a disciple mourning his teacher, not by anyone fleeing a thunderbolt. What people in the capital privately feared at the time is not something the surviving sources tell us. What the records do show is an order: enshrinement first, the written record of the curse afterward.
In Becket’s case, the movement to venerate him as martyr and saint began almost immediately. Monks collected reports of miracles, wrote biographies, and the cult spread beyond England.
In both cases, that same power later helped to build and spread the cult.
In 919, by order of Emperor Daigo, a shrine building was completed over Michizane’s grave. In the fourth month of 923 the court revoked his demotion, restored him to Minister of the Right, and conferred on him the senior second rank.
Henry II went further. In 1172, at Avranches and Caen in Normandy, he performed the public rites that accompanied his reconciliation with the church and received absolution from the papal side. Then, on 12 July 1174, he walked barefoot to Canterbury, showed penitence at Becket’s tomb, and submitted to a scourging by the clergy.
The two acts of atonement are not equivalent. What Henry II admitted was not that he had ordered the killing, but that his own words and conduct had brought it about. Even so, the king went as far as taking a public beating. Emperor Daigo had a shrine built and returned the offices, but performed no rite in which responsibility was spoken aloud. Both powers lent a hand. The shape of the hand differed.
Chapter 2. The people who wrote it down
Becket’s death was classified as a death for the faith, which is to say a martyrdom, and Pope Alexander III canonized him on 21 February 1173, roughly two years after the killing.
Michizane’s death was not a martyrdom. It was read as the death of a man who died with his grievance unresolved, and the misfortunes that continued in the capital were tied to him as the work of a vengeful spirit.
From this it is tempting to draw a clean line: Becket died for his faith and so became a saint; Michizane did not and so became a ghost.
The evidence for that line is Becket’s final words.
“For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church I am ready to embrace death.”
Read on its own, that is a martyrdom. But consider who recorded it.
His name was Edward Grim. He was present at the killing and was wounded shielding Becket. He was also the author of a biography that presents Becket as a martyr.
So the words that prove he died for the faith were written down by a man who believed he died for the faith.
Grim’s testimony carries real weight. When the knights raised their swords he put himself in the way and took a deep wound to the arm. Five witnesses at the scene left accounts that broadly agree on the sequence of events.
Then Grim, his arm healed, wrote a life. What his pen added to the event was the word martyrdom. That last sentence carries two things at once: the record of a witness who put his body in the way, and an interpretation supplied by faith.
Apply the same question to Michizane. On the twenty-sixth day of the sixth month of 930, lightning struck the Seiryoden hall of the imperial palace, killing the major counselor Fujiwara no Kiyotsura and others.
The Nihon Kiryaku and the Fuso Ryakki record that day in detail. Black clouds rising from Mount Atago. Lightning striking the southwest pillar. Kiyotsura’s robes catching fire and his chest splitting open. Bodies carried out, weeping that would not stop, the emperor taking to his bed.
Not one line in those entries mentions Michizane. Neither text says the lightning was the work of his spirit.
So when were Michizane and the lightning joined?
One early text linking his spirit to the strike is the Dokyo Shonin Meidoki, an account of a monk’s journey to the underworld. No contemporary original survives. One early form of it is preserved as an abridgement quoted in the Fuso Ryakki under the year 941, a compilation put together in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Related tales were passed down in varying forms in the later Tenjin engi literature.
The death of Fujiwara no Tokihira in 909 works the same way. The Nihon Kiryaku records only that he died. The claim that he died tormented by a vengeful spirit appears in the Jozo den, quoted in the later Fuso Ryakki.
The first mention of Michizane’s vengeful spirit in the Nihon Kiryaku comes in the entry for the twenty-first day of the third month of 923, attributing the death of Crown Prince Yasuakira to his spirit.
Worth repeating: the Nihon Kiryaku itself was compiled in the eleventh to twelfth centuries.
Then there is the Okagami, a historical tale of the late Heian period, which describes lightning approaching the Seiryoden during the Engi era while Tokihira was still alive, and Tokihira drawing his sword to face it down.
This story appears in no earlier text. And the Okagami does not describe the strike of 930 at all.
Some scholars therefore read this passage as a story transplanted from 930 back into Tokihira’s lifetime.
In the various recensions of the Tenjin engi, both the Tokihira anecdote and the 930 strike appear, so that lightning hits the Seiryoden twice.
Among the surviving illustrated scrolls of the Kitano Tenjin Engi, the oldest is the Jokyu version held by Kitano Tenmangu. These scrolls alternate pictures with passages of text, and the text carries the era name Jokyu 1, that is 1219, two hundred and eighty-nine years after the lightning strike.
Older paintings may have been lost. One thing is certain. A record of an accident that ran to a few lines had grown, by 1219, into a sweeping picture scroll with multiple scenes. The story had been growing from text into images across the centuries.
The 930 entry recorded lightning and the dead. Michizane’s name was attached to that event in documents written well afterward. The lightning fell in 930. “Michizane’s lightning” was born later, inside the written record.
Becket’s case runs the same way, though the evidence there stands far closer to the event. That he died is fact. That his death was a martyrdom is the meaning a biographer at the scene gave it.
Where did that judgment come from? The explanation that dying for the faith is what makes a saint falls apart once you look at one more man.
Chapter 3. England’s other dead king
On 18 March 978, Edward the Martyr, King of the English, was killed at Corfe in Dorset. He had reigned three years and was still in his teens.
Edward’s death fits no template of martyrdom. Behind it lay a struggle over the succession, and after a thousand years the identity and motive of whoever struck the blow remain unknown.
The body was buried at Wareham without the honors due a king, and in 980 it was translated to the abbey at Shaftesbury. Miracles were reported and the tomb became a pilgrimage site. Out of this he came to be called Edward the Martyr.
Edward’s half-brother Æthelred took the throne through his death, and in later years became the principal royal patron of his cult. Around 1001 the relics were elevated again at Shaftesbury under his active promotion, and he endowed the abbey, making his brother into a holy king. How Æthelred himself was involved in the killing is not recorded in the sources. What is certain is that the man who gained a crown by his brother’s death put considerable effort into his brother’s sanctification.
England has several such dead. Kenelm of Mercia. Æthelberht of East Anglia.
Catherine Cubitt, a medieval historian of the Anglo-Saxon period, argues that this kind of veneration cannot be explained as royal political manipulation alone, and that one has to account for the ordinary piety of local people toward royals who had been violently killed, and for the shared narrative shapes that hagiography supplied.
Now look back at where we started.
Edward did not die for the faith, and became a saint anyway. Dying for the faith, then, is not a necessary condition for sainthood. Which leaves open the possibility that Becket became a saint for reasons lying somewhere other than the reason for his death. Michizane also did not die for the faith, and became a vengeful spirit.
Two situations with much in common produced a saint on one side and a vengeful spirit on the other. What divided them lay after death.
Chapter 4. Who supplied the name
The word saint
In Catholic teaching, adoration belongs to God alone, and saints are not objects of adoration.
People do call on saints by name, address them, and say “pray for us,” asking them to intercede with God. This is veneration. A saint is not an equal of God in power, and is someone one may petition in prayer without adoring. Intercession runs through Christ, and it is God who gives grace.
So when did a procedure for recognizing someone as a saint begin?
The earliest recorded case of a formal papal canonization is Ulrich, bishop of Augsburg, in 993.
Around 1171 to 1172, Pope Alexander III wrote to the king of Sweden that no one should be venerated as a saint without the authorization of the Roman church. Whether that letter was written from the outset as a regulation binding on the whole church is a matter on which scholars differ.
In 1234 the letter was incorporated into the Decretals of Gregory IX, establishing a legal framework in which papal approval was the norm for formal canonization. Local cults continued to live on, but papal examination and approval became, over a long stretch of time, the standard route to canonization.
Edward died in 978, at a point when there was more than one door through which a saint could be recognized. Veneration spread, miracles were reported, a cult was folded into the liturgy, clergy and kings pushed it along, and a saint could be made that way.
Becket was canonized in 1173. He is a saint the pope approved. And it was the same pope who began saying that saints without Roman authorization should not be venerated.
The institution of canonization was not something that had always existed. It was built during roughly the two centuries between Edward and Becket. In western Europe as well, a movement ran from cults sustained by local communities, clergy, and royal power toward a system controlled by the papacy, in stages. Edward and Becket stand near the two ends of that concentration, Edward before papal approval had hardened into a rule, Becket as it was taking hold.
The word goryo
The word goryo first appears in the sources in connection with a court-sponsored goryo-e, a rite for the placation of such spirits, in the Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku, describing a ceremony at the Shinsen-en garden on the twentieth day of the fifth month of 863. Six spirits were enshrined there, among them Emperor Sudo, that is Prince Sawara. This was forty years before Michizane’s death.
The Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku records that people regarded epidemics and calamities as the work of goryo, and that the court held the goryo-e as an act of prayer. It also records that by imperial command the four gates of the Shinsen-en were opened, and music, dance, and variety performances were made available to the people of the capital.
The goryo-e was therefore both a religious rite meant to soothe calamity-bringing spirits and bring the trouble to an end, and a highly public urban festival. A rite that quiets fear and a festival that draws a crowd are not opposites. One way to read this combination is that fear was not simply shut out of the city. It was reorganized into a public rite, something people could gather around.
Which dead were called goryo?
Ito Nobuhiro, in a paper published in Nagoya University’s Studies in Language and Culture, identifies common features: having been suspected of a grave crime against the state, having died outside the capital, and having come to be regarded by people as wrongly accused. Michizane fits all of them.
The vocabulary and the precedents for receiving Michizane as a goryo were already present in the capital forty years before he died.
The living who did the naming
Establishing a saint’s cult involved a sequence: a life was written, miracles were recorded, the cult was folded into the liturgy, clergy and kings lent support.
The authority of a goryo went through its own sequence: association with calamity, an oracle, the establishment of rites, and recognition by society.
In both cases, living people recorded a death, a calamity, and a miracle, and attached them to the vocabulary they had at hand.
For Michizane the sequence runs like this. In 905 a disciple raised a memorial hall. In 919 a shrine building was completed by imperial command. In 923 the court restored his rank. In 942 an oracle came to a woman of the capital named Tajihi no Ayako. In 947 a shrine was built at Kitano.
Disciple, emperor, court, ordinary townspeople. People in very different positions moved this forward one step at a time across more than forty years.
For Becket, monks recorded miracles, a pope canonized, a king knelt at the tomb. For Edward, monks moved the body and royal power sustained the cult.
Chapter 5. How distant lands make the connection
There is only one body
When Saint Martin died in 397, the people of Tours and Poitiers are said to have fought over the body.
There is only one body.
The western cult of relics grew up with that constraint. Relics included not only bones but objects the saint had used, and objects brought into contact with the body or the tomb, so it was possible to produce many items connected to a saint without dividing the body.
There are limits even so. A saint used a finite number of objects in life. Contact relics require a place where the body rests and a church to manage it.
In Becket’s case a method emerged that pushed past those limits. It was called the Water of Saint Thomas.
The monks of Canterbury prepared water diluted with Becket’s blood and gave it to pilgrims, who drank it, applied it to afflicted parts, and carried it home in ampullae, small lead-tin alloy flasks worn on a cord around the neck.
Flasks survive bearing the Latin inscription that Thomas is the best physician for the worthy sick.
Without dividing the body, water mixed with blood could be diluted again and again, producing far more contact objects than a finite body could ever yield. But diluted water looks like nothing but water.
Here is the heart of relic veneration. What matters is not how a thing looks. A thing becomes connected to a saint once it is known where it came from, who carried it, and who guaranteed its authenticity.
This is provenance.
Inviting the deity in
Japan developed a different method.
According to the Shinto Jiten, when the deity of a main shrine is enshrined elsewhere, the portion of the divine spirit that is divided off is called a bunrei. The act of inviting that deity to a new place and enshrining it there is kanjo. The divided spirit is understood to work exactly as the deity of the main shrine does.
Dazaifu Tenmangu counts around ten thousand Tenmangu and Tenjin shrines across Japan, among the country’s most widespread shrine networks. The routes by which they came into being are not uniform. Some were established by kanjo from Dazaifu or Kitano. Others grew out of local Michizane traditions, or out of existing local cults of thunder deities and tenjin.
In some cases of kanjo, a new site receives a shinji, a sacred token, or a talisman from the main shrine and begins its rites from there. Who may grant such tokens, and to whom, is itself a way of managing authority over what counts as a legitimate kanjo.
In a kanjo, a shrine building goes up at the new site, an object of worship is installed, and rites are performed. What this demonstrates is that this shrine has formally received the deity from the main shrine.
This is yuisho, established provenance of a different kind.
Provenance in the western sense and yuisho both combine a material medium with a procedure guaranteeing legitimate transmission. In the Becket cult, what mattered was being able to trace contact with the saint’s body or tomb. In kanjo, what matters is that the divine spirit was received from the main shrine and that appropriate rites have continued. The difference is not object versus procedure. It is what continuity is being demonstrated. The first places relative weight on contact with the saint’s body, the second on the transmission of the spirit and the continuity of rites.
Chapter 6. The dead that power draws in
The edict sending Michizane to Dazaifu came from Emperor Daigo.
The order to build a shrine over his grave, completed in 919, and the restoration of his rank in 923, came from the same Emperor Daigo.
Henry II went to the tomb at Canterbury in penance, and afterward took Becket as his own protector.
Æthelred took the throne through his brother’s death, and in later years became the strongest backer of his brother’s cult. No involvement in the killing has been established.
Line up these three, and one sentence almost writes itself: the killer made the victim his protector. It is too clean to be true. What Æthelred had to do with his brother’s death is unknown, and the people who later looked to Michizane as a guardian of the capital were a different generation from the ones who drove him out. The reasons differ too: to restore honor, to atone for guilt, to prove a reign legitimate, to halt a run of calamities.
What the three share is not a motive. It is a move. Power reached into the cult of a dead man and pulled him inside its own institutions.
For Michizane the story does not end there. Once drawn into the institution, the dead man kept accumulating meanings he had not carried at the start.
The cult spread to Kitano and later came under court protection. According to Kitano Tenmangu’s chronology, by 1081 the shrine stood among the twenty-two shrines, the court-protected guardians of the imperial capital.
In time, the memory of his learning and literary skill in life was absorbed into a place for quieting calamity, and devotion aimed at success in study spread.
When that devotion spread is disputed. Some read it back to the poetry gatherings and linked-verse sessions of the Kamakura and Muromachi periods. Dazaifu points to the late fifteenth century. Kitano Tenmangu points to the terakoya schools of the Edo period. In any of these accounts, it makes sense to see a gradual change over several centuries.
The older meaning was not overwritten. Kitano Tenmangu still distributes the brown rice used in the festival held on the anniversary of Michizane’s death as yakuyoke genmai, brown rice for warding off misfortune. The god of learning and the god who wards off calamity stand side by side.
Conclusion
The meanings that attached to Michizane, Becket, and Edward after death did not come from the manner of their deaths alone.
Living people wrote down Becket’s last words. Living people tied the lightning at the Seiryoden to Michizane. And not everything that was written survived.
The sources recording the lightning survive, and so do the later documents that connected the event to Michizane’s spirit. Becket’s shrine was destroyed and what remains are the small flasks that ended up in rivers. At Dazaifu, the Buddhist temple of Anrakuji that had adjoined the shrine was abolished, and the shrine remains.
Students gather at Tenmangu shrines because the meaning “god of learning” survived into the present. Next to it, the devotion to warding off misfortune is living too. From an object of fear that brought calamity, to a power that drives calamity away. The brown rice given out at Kitano suggests the path along which the meaning of that spiritual force shifted by degrees. The power to curse and the power to protect were never cleanly separated, and they still share the same shrine.
Where the dead were enshrined, under what claim of provenance, and how that memory was tied into politics and society: what survived of those choices is what stands in front of us now.
Japan is one of the most geographically extreme places humans have ever settled: a chain of volcanic islands wracked by earthquakes, drenched by typhoons, and folded into mountains and narrow plains. And yet it became home to one of the world’s great civilizations.
How? The answer is geography, read closely.
Most writing about Japan looks at it from the outside. I read it from the inside, the way a geologist reads rock: as a record of forces, choices, and survival written into the land.
I’m a Strategic Geography Advisor based in Japan, and this newsletter is a field guide to the country’s hidden geography, the logic that placed its ancient capitals, shaped its food, and taught its people to live with a restless land.
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Geography is the record of survival strategy. Let’s read it together.
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Issei Takinami is a Strategic Geography Advisor and author of several bestselling geography books in Japan, including 『面白すぎる地理の話』 (The Fascinating Stories of Geography, Sangyo Henshu Center, 2026). He serves as Representative Director of the Institute for Japan Regional Geography (IJRG).