Fox symbolism

Kitsune: Inari's foxes in Japan

Pairs of stone foxes sit at Inari shrines across Japan. Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto says foxes are “the messengers (kindreds) of Inari Okami”, invisible like the kami, and called byakkosan, “white foxes”; it adds, “this does not mean that Inari Okami is a fox!” Inari is the kami of rice, and Hearn explains the keys some stone foxes hold in their mouths by Inari's power to give wealth, which in old Japan, he suggests, was reckoned in rice.

Hearn set down the Izumo peasants' beliefs as he heard them: “All foxes have supernatural power. There are good and bad foxes.” The Inari fox is good; the worst is the small Ninko or Hito-kitsune, “the fox of demoniacal possession”; the wild fox can take any shape and make itself invisible, but dogs can always see it, so it fears dogs. Hearn thought the belief in supernatural foxes came to Japan from China no earlier than the tenth or eleventh century, and was blended there with Shinto and Buddhist ideas.

Huli jing: the Chinese fox spirit

Fox spirits are among the commonest figures in Pu Songling's Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio; its translator Herbert Giles noted that the author once thought of calling the book “Devil and Fox Stories”. Giles explained a fox wedding in one tale by the Chinese belief that the fox can appear “at will under the human form”, and do “either good or evil to its friends or foes.” Xiaofei Kang, professor of world religions and history at George Washington University, in The Cult of the Fox (Columbia University Press), describes a fox cult that has drawn Chinese people of every class for more than five centuries, worshipping fox spirits and exorcising them, and that survived bans by imperial, republican and communist governments in homes and shrines across northern China.

The fox in Aesop's fables

In Aesop's best-known fox fable, a hungry fox jumps for grapes on a high trellis, fails, and walks off saying, “I thought those Grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”

Meeting a fox as a sign

In English folklore a fox in your path warned of deceit. Sir Thomas Browne, quoted by John Brand, explained the old omens of animals crossing the road: a fearful animal like the hare foretold something to be feared, and “the meeting of a fox presaged some future imposture.”

The fox in Cherokee lore

James Mooney, collecting between 1887 and 1890, found that the fox “does not appear in the tribal folklore” of the Cherokee, though it is named in one sacred formula. In a song against frostbite, a traveller takes on the powers of the wolf, deer, fox and opossum, “four animals whose feet, it is held, are never frostbitten.”

Related animals

The Dog symbolism is the fox's enemy in Hearn's Japanese beliefs, and the Wolf symbolism and hare share its omens in English folklore.