Anime-Myth.com v. With You

Occult References in Anime

The following essay was written by Jillian Burdsall And is reprinted here with her permission.

Anime is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as “Japanese animated films, typically having a science fiction theme.”1 Regardless of the themes present in various anime, one thing seems to be common: the majority of them are based on Japanese myth or some part of the occult. The references can be categorized into three distinct groups. The most predominant are those that reference Japanese mysticism. However, there are also many uses of westernized vampires as characters, and some vampire anime even take place in western countries (Hellsing).9 Also, there is a third group of anime that are almost completely based on occult principles and theories, borrowing such influences as magic circles, the entire layout of the Qabbalah, and even occult figures. To analyze the influence of the occult and mysticism on anime, I shall look at a few examples from each category. I will describe some of the ways the occult is manifested in these works, and try to find an explanation for the reason(s) that the artists who created the anime are so fascinated with the occult. I have included some reference material to make my points more understandable to the reader.

A few anime that deal with Japanese myths are Serial Experiments: Lain, Boogiepop Phantom, and the Mermaid Saga by Rumiko Takahashi. Two of these are set in the present day, and one, the Mermaid Saga, is set in ancient Japan. Many anime also seek to contrast the disillusionment of the current age of technology by placing modern-day characters into situations in the past, frequently Japan’s feudal era, when belief in legend was much more prevalent among average Japanese people. Anime like Inuyasha, where a young girl is transported to the past by falling down a well, become popular very easily because of the tension between the characters from different time periods being required to interact on a day-to-day basis.3

Serial Experiments: Lain and Boogiepop Phantom both deal with Japanese urban legends. The former legend is the belief that people can actually be transported into the Internet (in a very literal and physical sense of the word), and that each person has an exact double in the online world. Lain, the main character, comes into contact with her double and this leads her to wonder which version of herself is the true Lain.2 Modern occultists frequently channel their astral bodies outside of themselves (a technique called astral projection), which allows it to behave like their normal body while it is in a trance, and this practice is probably the origin of the idea of her being able to use the Internet as a means of transport for her astral body.4

In Boogiepop Phantom, you are shown the reactions of various characters to an event that happened in the past, and are shown how psychic energy from this occurrence has affected each person.5 According to the second law of psychic energy, a person’s mind has the ability to take in and/or change energy transmitted by other objects. Also, because the body is made up of energy, which the third law of psychic energy states, the energy that the mind receives can alter the body in many ways. This is proven true in the anime. The people affected by the event notice that they can sense things other people cannot, i.e., certain senses are magnified.6

In the Mermaid Saga, the main character is a girl who is being raised by mermaids as their food, in order to keep them human. This is a bit different than the western myth of mermaids in that they are truly monstrous, and require a sacrifice of either their own or a human to retain humanity themselves.7 Blood sacrifices have been used to give an occultist a boost of power needed to complete a spell. You could look at the sacrifice a mermaid requires to become human as providing the energy needed to change her body (which is itself energy) into a human form. Rituals have been performed for countless years, and in some voodoo rituals, animals are still sacrificed for the power they lend to a spell.8

On the other side of the coin, many vampire anime are set in the western world, such as Hellsing, which is set in Britain, 9 and Blood: The Last Vampire, which is set in the a U.S. Air Force base in the 1960’s. 10 Another popular vampire anime movie, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, isn’t very clear on what its setting is, except that it is in a post-apocalyptic world in the distant future. 11 In Hellsing, one of the main characters is named Alucard, which is an ananym for Dracula, and is coincidentally a vampire. The anime is really about how Seras Victoria (an ex-policewoman) deals with the changes from human to vampire, though. It’s sometimes hard to tell where the focus is in the anime, though, because more attention is brought to Alucard and how he works with humans. Many of the gothic images are taken directly from Dracula, and there is even an homage to Dante’s Inferno in which Seras is drowned in the lake of blood in a nightmare of hers.9

Blood: The Last Vampire is a bit more unique, however. During Halloween at a high school, a girl is having an outbreak of anemia, so she is taken to the nurse’s office by a friend. However, when Saya, a vampire slayer, attacks her and the friend transforms into a monstrous version of a vampire, it’s obvious that her health problems weren’t due to anemia. One of the biggest reasons this movie is such an original take on a vampire story is the way the vampire is portrayed. Most vampires have some redeeming quality; she was simply a monster and looked as much like one as possible. The vampire design did not seem western at all to me. It was more like the movie was a statement on the fears of Americans during that era than a vampire flick. This is the only anime I have come across like it; all the others show the vampires as very human creatures, with similar features and personalities to a human.10

If anything, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust inspires pity for the vampire who is supposed to be evil. He kidnaps a young girl, Charlotte, from her home, and is pursued by D, a Dunpeal (half vampire and half human). D had been offered a larger sum of money from her parents to return Charlotte to her family alive and not yet turned, or to kill her if she had been. The vampire who kidnapped her, Meier Link, is apparently in love with the girl. They travel by coach (typical vampire) to the castle of Carmila, and once they arrive a giant battle between Meier Link and D ensues. In the midst of all this, Charlotte, who was tricked by Carmila and is lying on the floor unconscious with her blood dripping down the staircase in the center of the castle has her ring taken off by Leila, another vampire hunter after Meier. Leila throws the ring across the floor, and this stops the battle. D takes the ring and leaves with Leila, as the tower in the castle launches to some weird vampire heaven with Meier Link and Charlotte inside.12

The ending is quite surreal, to say the least. Bloodlust is perhaps as far opposite in vampire anime as you can get from Blood, yet they are both compelling stories. One treats the vampire as man, the other as a monster. This brings to mind a question long pondered by occultists and horror writers alike: What is worse, the monster within or the monster without? I think it’s a bit more interesting when you can see a human side to the demons, because in some aspects it makes the story more believable. Unfortunately, this was not enough to make Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust believable in the least.

However, other anime are even more blatant in their borrowing of concepts and icons from the occult. Anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, acclaimed by many critics to be the greatest anime of all time, Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena), one of the most successful shoujo (geared towards young girls) anime ever, are almost entirely based on occult principles. The plots of Tokyo Babylon and X: The Movie rely heavily on occult practices and laws, and a show like Fullmetal Alchemist, which is slowly but surely gaining mainstream popularity in the U.S., could not exist without the occult concept of alchemy.

Evangelion borrows mostly from various religions, but there is also some occult influence on it. The appearance of the Tree of Life, directly taken from the Qabbalah, and the form of Lillith are the most predominant aspects of the occult found in this anime.15, 16 Lillith is depicted as a grotesque seven-eyed monster, and is to blame for the creation of the sixteen “angels”, or other forms of life that could have taken the place of humans. While her presence and a short appearance of the Tree of Life near the end of the series are not much compared to other series, she is still crucial to the plot of the anime.15 Utena relies even more heavily on the Qabbalah for plot elements, though. 17, 18

Shoujo Kakumei Utena (abbreviated as Utena by fans) is about a girl, named Utena, who appears to be completely normal. She attends school, just like every other child. The difference here is that the student politics at her school are manifested in duels between students. The theme of revolution is repeated throughout the anime, but it is not a political revolution; the revolution spoken of is a revolution of the spirit and mind.17 Each duelist seems to personify a sefirot of the Qabbalah, and even the sword Utena wields against him or her represents the flaming sword that cuts through the sefirot. It’s as though each actual battle she wins symbolizes another path she is moving towards on the Tree of Life. The ultimate revolution for her is complete knowledge of herself, which would be to achieve Keter on the Tree.18

Some of the main characters are personifications of a few of the paths on the Tree; for instance, Juri (orange) would be Hod, mostly due to the responsibilities she assumes and the awe that many other students, including Shiori have for her. Touga (red) would represent Gevurah because, in the beginning, he had the most control over the duels. Utena’s duel with Saionji (green) was her first, and the point at which she decided to become a duelist. That is in accordance with the description of Netzach, a path that, like our emotions, determines whether or not a person will continue to move through the paths of the Tree. Miki (blue) is very much the mercy of Chesed.17, 18

Utena herself (pink) is likened to the four paths in the center of the Tree, and I believe the real story in this anime is her evolution from Malchut to Keter. In some senses, she is like multiple paths at once; she is the point from which most of the action comes from in the series (Malchut), but she is also one of the most balanced characters (Tipheret). Dios, the prince, is the ideal she is always searching for, but she realizes eventually that her ideal is a lie and becomes the ideal herself. This is her transformation to the path of Keter. Anshi (purple) is Yesod, the little voice in the back of your head that most people never listen to until it’s far too late. The reason that Utena has such success is that she fights to protect Anshi. So the underlying message of the anime is that you should not ignore what you believe is right, even if people call you a fool and fight you because of it, but that their opposition should make you fight harder for what you believe. The idea of self-improvement through tribulations is also at the heart of the Qabbalah, which is probably why it works so well as a means for conveyance of this theme in the series. 17, 18

Tokyo Babylon and X deal mostly with spiritual energies and the battles between good and evil spirits. In Tokyo Babylon, a young occultist, Subaru, who is involved with police murder investigations, takes on the case of a serial killer of women on the subway. He comes into contact with two people who both use psychokinesis to feel what happened in a certain place with their bare hands. In another episode, he takes the case of an executive who has been in close contact with all the people who were to be the vice president of the corporation he works at before him when they died, due to freak accidents. He had the uncanny luck of not being able to be killed, and the death that should have been his in each circumstance was transferred to the people around him at the time. Somehow, he had managed to figure this out and used it to his advantage. Subaru’s occult teacher, Seishiro, learns of this and confronts the executive. They use projections of their astral bodies to fight each other, and eventually Subaru’s father defeats him.19

In the midst of all this, Subaru must defend a young girl from the demon she unleashed by killing her dog and attempting to create a spell to kill the executive, whom she believes murdered her brother. Subaru’s teacher could sense that she had made mistakes in her curse, however, and the spell backfired on her, sending the demon after her. 19 Subaru had to protect her from it by drawing a magic circle with lipstick. Perhaps he should have invested in drawing one on a sheet and carrying it with him, with his line of work.14 However, this series is just a prequel to X.

X is concerned with the battle between the Dragons of Heaven and Dragons of Earth, two groups of seven people each who have occult powers. They are fighting for influence over the world, and there is the tension between the Dragons of Earth wanting to purify the earth of all humanity, and the Dragons of Heaven who wish the earth to remain the way it is. This anime is another manifestation of the struggle between the old traditions of Japan and the technological environment of today.20

Even the practice of alchemy seems to have influenced anime. Alchemy is the very backbone of the anime Fullmetal Alchemist. Two young boys, Edward and Alphonse Elrich, attempted to create a homunculus to bring their mother back from beyond the grave. With their failure, Alphonse lost his body and is doomed to be trapped inside armor, and Edward lost an arm and a leg, which became automail. Human alchemy is the most difficult task of an alchemist, and takes a great amount of both energy and mass. The rules of alchemy must be obeyed; you are required to sacrifice something of equal value and chemical makeup to the object you are creating. Because they tried to transport a soul, they were punished in this manner. 21 The anime agrees with the basic principles of alchemy that state that you can only transmute a certain material into something else, and it must have the same mass and chemical makeup as the original. You can only change the makeup and appearance of something by separating it into its elements and then recombining them in a different fashion to bring them closer to “divine.”21, 22

There are a variety of reasons why the occult is seen so prevalently in anime. It could be that many writers are fascinated with elements of the occult, and choose to create works about them. They always seem to add some unique twist to the original myth, though, or hide the occult references so well that someone with relatively low occult knowledge wouldn’t recognize them. An example of this is Hellsing, where Alucard is a traditional vampire, but he serves a human, which is not what you’d expect. 9 Also, personifying aspects of the Qabbalah, like in Utena, is an interesting take on occult philosophy. 17, 18

I think the predominance of the occult in anime is also due to the fact that an anime will not be licensed (and translated into English) unless it has some popularity in Japan, and anime that are based on some part of the occult tend to be more popular, at least in recent years. This implies that people in general are showing more interest in the occult. So perhaps the reason that anime seems to be drawing more of a main-stream audience lately could be the same as the reason more people are becoming interested in the occult. Interest in the occult seems to follow the pattern of increasing in times of disillusionment, especially wartime, which is the climate of the day. People attempt to find meaning in life by looking outside themselves, and some find it in the occult. Anime may be another way that people find something of meaning, by being sucked into a fictional universe that is modeled after the real world, but altered slightly. I believe that the heavy usage of the occult in anime in the last 10-15 years is due to the increasingly popularity of the occult, because anime is an altered projection of everyday life, and the occult has been gaining a sizable following in recent years.23 What new pattern this trend will take is unknown, but I suspect that the occult will continue to be shown in anime, as well as other aspects of popular culture, until the political tides of the world change again.

Works Cited

1. Ask Oxford. 1 Dec. 2004. http://www.askoxford.com

2. Serial Experiments: Lain. Dirs. Ryutaro Nakamura and Lia Sargent. 2001. Pioneer Video, 2002.

3. Inuyasha World. 1 Dec. 2004. http://www.inuyashaworld.com

4. Astral Projection. Dec 7, 2004. http://www.meaningoflife.i12.com/Astral1.htm

5. AnimeNfo: Boogiepop Phantom. 2 Dec. 2004. http://www.animenfo.com/animetitle,82,jlneed,boogiepop_phant.html

6. Zammit, Victor. “The Seven Laws of Psychic Energy.” 2 Dec. 2004. http://www.victorzammit.com/articles/sevenlaws.html

7. Price, Marissa. “Japanese Mermaid Lore.” 2 Dec. 2004. http://www.anime-online.com/takahashi/lore.html

8. Hefner, Alan G. “Sacrifice.” 2 Dec. 2004. http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/s/sacrifice.html

9. Hellsing. Dirs. Umanosuke Iida and Yasunori Urata. 2002. Pioneer Video, 2002.

10. Blood – The Last Vampire. 2 Dec. 2004. http://www.manga.com/bloodthemovie/

11. “Adam’s Vampire Hunter FAQ.” The Otaku.com. 2 Dec. 2004. http://articles.theotaku.com/view.php?action=retrieve&id=1

12. Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust Official Website. 2 Dec. 2004. http://www.vampirehunterdbloodlust.com

13. “Onyms.” 2 Dec. 2004. http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/onyms.htm

14. “Magic Circle, The.” 2 Dec. 2004. http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/m/magic_circle_the.html

15. The Lilith Shrine. 2 Dec. 2004. http://www.lilitu.com/lilith/khephprint.html

16. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Dirs. Hideaki Anno, Amanda Winn Lee, and Matt Greenfield. 2002. ADV Films, 2002.

17. Shoujo Kakumei: Utena. Dirs. Kunihiko Ikuhara and Jim Malone. 2003. Software Sculptors, 2003.

18. “The Tree of Life.” Ifdawn.com. Dec 2, 2004. http://www.borndigital.com/tree/

19. Tokyo Babylon. Dirs. Koichi Chigira and Michael Bakewell. 2000. Central Park Media, 2002.

20. X. Dir. Rintaro. 2000. Manga Entertainment, 2002.

21. “Those Who Challenge the Sun” and “Condemned Body.” Fullmetal Alchemist. Dirs. Mizushima Seiji, Colleen Clinkenbeard, and Mike McFarland. Cartoon Network. 5 and 12 Dec. 2004, respectively.

22. “What is Alchemy…” 3 Dec. 2004. http://www.alchemylab.com/what_is_alchemy.htm

23. “Why is Wicca So Successful?” Dec 7, 2004. http://www.templeofdemeter.com/wicca.html