The term “agent of chaos” has been rattling around in the back of my brain since a billionaire announced his intention to acquire a “sporadically profitable social company,” to quote the New York Times, for $44 billion, roughly 19 percent of his net worth. Some used it in the negative, but mostly it was the fandom who murmured it, admiringly, after news of the purchase broke. Their trickster king, at it again.

In this chaotic period, people like Elon Musk, who seemingly wield chaos like a lightning rod, have become lauded for such acts, regardless of their motivations, or plans, or if they even end up seeing them through. And this moniker, “agent of chaos,” has come to cloak them in a kind of neutrality—after all, they’re just sowing chaos for chaos’ sake. The label, I’ve noticed, not only seems to absolve them of any responsibility, but even holds up their pot-stirring as some kind of noble act.

The use of “agent of chaos” in this way appears to have come into vogue after the late Heath Ledger, playing the Joker, popularized the term in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.

“​​Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos,” the oft-quoted line begins. “I’m an agent of chaos,” the Joker continues, “and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”

The Dark Knight, which came out in 2008, was widely considered a commentary on the American invasion of Iraq. The Joker, in turn, spoke to fans who embraced the character as the philosophical anarchist the times demanded: “He serves as a chaotic mascot for discord in an overly ordered world that ironically, to them, makes no sense,” explains a Comic Book Reviews article that gets at the character’s appeal, adding that the Joker “disrupts the status quo, standing in opposition to all society has to offer, and laughs.”

But the agent of chaos archetype is one that humans have been drawn to throughout the ages. The character appears in mythologies, folklores, and religions around the world—from the Coyote, a trickster character who frequents Native American tales, to Anansi the Spider, which originates from the Asante people of Ghana.

The origins of the literal term agent of chaos, however, is somewhat shrouded. The creation of the phrase itself arguably traces back to an 1895 book Creation and Chaos in the Primeval Era and the Eschaton by German Old Testament scholar Hermann Gunkel. Its arrival in popular culture appears to have come much later, with the term agent of chaos possibly debuting as late as the Cold War.

Its emergence in the 1960s came at a point when chaos was everywhere. The culture reflected this with offerings like Get Smart, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s parody of the spy genre, where KAOS was a literal institution, in fact, the international organization of evil. Even scientists began taking chaos seriously at this time. In 1963, meteorologist Edward Lorenz published a paper documenting observations from a computer model he’d built to predict the weather. His discovery gave rise to modern chaos theory—which holds that even apparently random systems possess some pattern or order.

It was in this moment that American science fiction author Norman Spinrad published his second novel, titled Agent of Chaos, in 1967.

“As far as I know I invented that term,” Spinrad told me over the phone about Agent of Chaos, which drew new attention during #Brexit for the name of its main character, which so happened to be Boris Johnson.

Years before the real Johnson became a global agent of chaos, Spinrad’s fictional Johnson was the bumbling head of the Democratic League, one of three powers competing for world domination. The League’s main nemesis was the powerful totalitarian Hegemonic Council, led by Vladimir Khustov, but a more dangerous opponent lurked in the background chasing them both: the Brotherhood of Assassins, led by Robert Ching, otherwise known as Agent of Chaos. The book opens with the question, “Which of these leaders would you follow?” But Spinrad cautions against making a hasty judgement. “Don’t make up your mind too fast,” he writes.

Spinrad wrote Agent of Chaos in San Francisco, with the Vietnam War on his mind. “My point was that these two things working together”—democracy and totalitarianism—“end up with a third thing, which is chaos,” he said.

Over time, Agent of Chaos has acquired a cult following, particularly among readers who are incarcerated, many of whom have gravitated toward the novel’s pushback against clear-cut power structures.

“My idea of chaos was more positive,” says Spinrad, reflecting on the work’s legacy. “It was a different idea of consciousness and politics. Now, the agent of chaos is something more negative with things falling apart. In that sense that’s not the way I intended it to be. But there it is.”

With this framing, it’s worth pausing to consider who the agents of chaos of our time really should be.

After all, reading about agents of chaos throughout history, what quickly becomes clear is that while some were bad actors, many were working to better society. I especially appreciated the perspective of professor Namorah Gayle Byrd, who is Chitimacha/Cherokee and an expert on trickster tales. In her writings, she calls attention to how tricksters are actually a force of good because they challenge the status quo and make people reevaluate their choices. That’s why she refers to them as “society’s caretaker.”

If such characters cross a line—and “become oppressors and abuse their power to transform spaces”—then, she argues, they no longer deserve the trickster label.

For those who don’t meet the requirements—because they “use their powers of chaos and transformation to destroy rather than to balance or rebalance societal norms”—they still have an important role of their own to play, according to Byrd. They’re “the types that call the real Tricksters to arms.”

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For her Zócalo Sketchbook, Encarnación has created five tattoo designs, each of which gives life to a different animal or plant creation myth: The peacock nods to the tale of Argos, the trusted watchman of Hera who put his eyes on the bird to honor him after his death. The cheetah comes from the traditional Zulu story that explains how the cheetah cried for the first time and got black lines on her face after learning a hunter had killed her cubs. The plants derive from the myth of Narcissus, in which the young hunter gets transformed into his namesake flower after pining after his own image. The catfish pulls from the Japanese tale of Yamazu about a giant fish who lives underground and causes earthquakes and tsunamis. Finally, the spider is inspired by Arachne, the weaver-turned-arachnid, whose fate is a cautionary note for why human shouldn’t try to challenge the gods—or at least not Athena.

“One of the biggest challenges of tattoo design is making a story fit within a small space, while still making it legible and beautiful,” Encarnación tells Zócalo. “That’s where the rich color and overlaid watercolor splatters and textures come in, to breathe life back into the ancient tales and make them exciting for someone who wants to honor them today.”

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Cats are everywhere in Japan. While it is easy to see they are well-loved, Japan also fears cats. The country has a long, often terrifying history of folklore involving monstrous supernatural cats. Japan’s magic catlore is wide and deep—ranging from the fanciful, magical shapeshifters (bakeneko) to the horrendous demonic corpse-eaters (kasha). That’s where I come in.

I began researching Japan’s catlore while working on the comic book Wayward from Image comics. Written by Canadian Jim Zub with art by Japan-based American penciler Steve Cummings and American colorist Tamra Bonvillain, Wayward was a classic story of shifting societal beliefs that tackled the age-old question of whether man creates gods or gods create man. It pitted Japan’s folkloric yokai against rising young powers that would supplant them. One of our main characters was Ayane, a magical cat girl of the type known as a neko musume. Ayane was built of cats who come together in a mystical merger to create a living cat avatar.

As a Japan consultant, my job on Wayward was to create supplemental articles to complement the stories. This meant I researched and wrote about things as varied as Japan’s police system, the fierce demons called oni, and the fires that ravaged Tokyo between 1600 and 1868. And, of course, magic cats. I researched Japan’s catlore to incorporate in Ayane’s character. Normally, my work was one-and-done: As soon as I finished with one topic, I moved onto the next. But cats, well… I guess you could say they sunk their claws into me—and they haven’t let go yet.

Studying folklore means following trails as far as you can go with the understanding that you’ll never reach your destination. The further back you peel the layers of time, the mistier things become. You leave what you can prove and enter that nebulous realm of “best guess.”

Take the fact that cats exist in Japan at all. No one knows exactly when and how they got there. The “best guess” is that they traveled down the silk road from Egypt to China and Korea, and then across the water. They came either as ratters guarding precious Buddhist sutras written on vellum, or as expensive gifts traded between emperors to curry favor. Most likely both of these things happened at different times.

But for our first confirmed record of a cat in Japan—where we can confidently set a stake in the timeline and say “Yes! This is unquestionably a cat!”—we must turn the dusty pages of an ancient diary.

On March 11, 889 CE, 22-year-old Emperor Uda wrote:

“On the 6th Day of the 2nd Month of the First Year of the Kampo era. Taking a moment of my free time, I wish to express my joy of the cat. It arrived by boat as a gift to the late Emperor, received from the hands of Minamoto no Kuwashi.

The color of the fur is peerless. None could find the words to describe it, although one said it was reminiscent of the deepest ink. It has an air about it, similar to Kanno. Its length is 5 sun, and its height is 6 sun. I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long.

In rebellion, it narrows its eyes and extends its needles. It shows its back.

When it lies down, it curls in a circle like a coin. You cannot see its feet. It’s as if it were circular Bi disk. When it stands, its cry expresses profound loneliness, like a black dragon floating above the clouds.

By nature, it likes to stalk birds. It lowers its head and works its tail. It can extend its spine to raise its height by at least 2 sun. Its color allows it to disappear at night. I am convinced it is superior to all other cats.”

As you can see, be they emperor or peasant, cat owners have changed little over the millennia. I will tell anyone who will listen that my cat (the monstrous beauty of a Maine coon called Shere Khan with whom I coexist in constant balance between pure love and open warfare) is superior to all other cats.

While cats were initially traded as priceless objects in Japan, unlike gold or gems or rare silks, these treasures were capable of doing something other valuables could not—multiplying. Cats made more cats. Over the centuries, cats bred and spread until by the 12th century they were common all over the island.

That was when they began to transform.

Japan has long held a folk belief that when things live too long, they manifest magical powers. There are many old stories explaining why this is true of foxes, tanuki, snakes, and even chairs. However, cats seem to be somewhat unique in the myriad powers they can manifest—and their multitude of forms. Perhaps this is because they are not indigenous to Japan. Whereas Japanese society evolved alongside foxes and tanukis, cats possess that aura of coming from outside the known world. Combine that with cats’ natural mysterious nature, their ability to stretch to seemingly unnatural proportions, how they can walk without a sound, and their glowing eyes that change shape in the night, and it’s the perfect recipe for a magical animal.

The first known appearance of a supernatural cat in Japan arrived in the 12th century. According to reports, a massive, man-eating, two-tailed cat dubbed the nekomata stalked the woods of what is now the Nara prefecture. The former capital of Japan, Nara was surrounded by mountains and forests. Hunters and woodsman regularly entered these forests around the city for trade. They knew the common dangers; but this brute monster was far beyond what they expected to encounter. According to local newspapers of the time, several died in the jaws of the nekomata. Massive and powerful, they were more like two-tailed tigers than the pampered pets of Emperor Uda. In fact, the nekomata may have actually been a tiger. There’s speculation today that the nekomata legends sprang from an escaped tiger brought over from China, possibly as part of a menagerie, or it was some other animal ravaged by rabies.

With the close of the 12th century, stories of the nekomata and supernatural felines went quiet for several centuries. Then came the arrival of the Edo period, when Japan’s magical cat population truly exploded.

Beginning around 1600, the country experienced a flowering of art and culture. Kabuki theater. Sushi. Ukiyoe wood block artists. Geisha. The first printing presses in Japan. All of these Edo period phenomena led to a flourishing industry of reading material for all classes—in many ways, a forerunner of manga. And as writers and artists soon found out, the country was hungry for tales of magic and Japanese monsters called yokai. Any work of art or theatrical play tinged with supernatural elements became a sure-fire hit.

In this golden age, a new species of supernatural cat appeared—the shape-changing bakeneko. As Japan urbanized, cat and human populations grew together. Now, cats were everywhere; not only as house pets and ratters but as roving strays feasting off the scraps from the new inventions of street sushi and ramen stands. And with them stories followed of cats able to transform into human shape. Japanese houses were mostly lit by fish oil lamps. Cats love to lap the oil, and at night, in the glowing lamplight, they cast huge shadows on the walls, seemingly morphing into massive creatures standing on their hind legs as they stretched. According to lore, cats who lived preternaturally long evolved into these bakeneko, killed their owners and took their place.

Not all bakeneko were lethal, however. Around 1781, rumors began to spread that some of the courtesans of the walled pleasure districts in the capital city of Edo were not human at all, but rather transformed bakeneko. The idea that passing through the doors of the Yoshiwara meant a dalliance with the supernatural held a delicious thrill to it. Eventually, these stories expanded beyond the courtesans to encompass an entire hidden cat world, including kabuki actors, artists, comedians, and other demimonde. When these cats left their homes at night, they donned kimonos, pulled out sake and shamisen, and basically held wild parties before slinking back home at dawn.

These stories proved irresistible to artists, who produced illustrations featuring a wild world of cats dancing and drinking late into the evening hours. The cats were depicted as anthropomorphic human-cat hybrids (although the bakeneko were capable of shapeshifting into fully human forms, too). They smoked pipes. Played dice. And got up to all kinds of trouble that every hard-working farmer wished they could indulge in. Artists also created works replicating cat versions of popular celebrities from the world of the pleasure quarters.

While bakeneko are the most numerous and popular of Japan’s magical cat population—and certainly the most artistically appealing—magical cats also lurked in darker corners.

Take the kasha, a demon from hell that feasts on corpses. Like the nekomata and bakeneko, the kasha were once normal house cats. But, as the story goes, the scent of dead bodies filled them with such an overwhelming desire to feast that they transformed into flaming devils. With their necromantic powers they were said to be able to manipulate corpses like puppets, making them rise up and dance. The kasha story still remains part of the culture in terms of funeral services. In Japan, it is customary after the death of a loved one to hold a wake where the body is brought home and the family gather. To this day, cats are put out of the room where the wake is held.

Some cat creatures, like the neko musume, were thought to be cat-human hybrids. They were said to be born from a cat’s curse on makers of the traditional instrument called the shamisen, which use drums stretched from the hides of cats. A shamisen maker who got too greedy might be cursed with a neko musume daughter as revenge. Instead of a beloved human daughter, they would find themselves with a cat in human form who was incapable of human speech, ate rats, and scratched their claws.

Perhaps the most persistent of the Edo period supernatural cats is the maneki neko, known in English by the sobriquet “Lucky Cat.” While truly a creature of commerce, this ubiquitous waving feline has folkloric origins—two of them, in fact. Gotokuji temple tells of a fortuitous cat that saved a samurai lord from a lightning strike during a terrible storm. The lord gave his patronage to the temple, which still exists today and happily sells thousands of replica cats to eager tourists. The other origin is of a poor old woman whose cat came to her in a dream and told her to sculpt a cat out of clay to sell at market. The woman marketed both her cat and her story, selling more and more cat statues until she retired rich and happy. These same cat statues are still sold worldwide today as the Maneki Neko. Obviously, both origin stories can’t be true, but that doesn’t stop the sales from rolling in. It’s not unusual at all to trace back a folkloric story and to find someone trying to make a buck on the other end. As the earlier artists discovered with their bakeneko prints, cats have always been good for sales.

The more you dig into Japan’s catlore the more you’ll find, from the gotoko neko, an old nekomata that mysteriously stokes fires at night or turns the heaters up in households in order to stay warm, to the cat islands of Tashirojima where cats outnumber people by more than five to one, to the endangered yamapikaryaa, said to survive only on the remote Iriomote islands. Most of these are born from the Edo period, however many are expanded folklore and real-world locations. Japan’s catlore continues to spread and I have no doubt that new supernatural forms are being born even now.

For me, Japan’s catlore has been nothing short of catnip. The more I learned the more I wanted to know. After I finished my Wayward research, I kept diving deeper and deeper until I had piles of translated folk stories and historical texts on Japan’s cats. I had no plans to do anything with it; it was a personal obsession. Finally, though, my publisher noticed, and said, Hey, I think we know what your next book is going to be about. Thus Kaibyō: The Supernatural Cats of Japan was born, a book I never intended to write, and yet to this day, remains the most popular thing I’ve ever written. Even after it published in 2017, I knew my journey into Japan’s catlore was hardly finished; I don’t think it ever will be.

I think Shere Khan approves.

The post The Mystical, Magical, Terrifying Supernatural Cats of Japan appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Traditionally Americans haven’t mourned in public. Funerals here tend to be private affairs—an interior scene at a funeral home, a few family and friends, some flowers. Big politicians may have public funerals, but most funerals—even for celebrities—are closed. Traditionally, too, we let the dead be dead: We may speak in whispers at the wake, but we don’t speak of the dead as still living. Instead, we call that “being in denial.”

Mourning online is changing our rituals. Not only do we mourn people we do not know personally, but the Facebook pages of deceased friends have the potential to live on, turning into spaces where friends and family write public messages, expressing intimate details for all to read as though the person were still alive, or just off vacationing in Thailand. Take this recent post on a deceased Facebook friend’s page: “It’s been about a year since you’ve passed and I never got to thank you for being the mentor that you were for the better part of the last decade. I had moved just a couple of weeks prior to your passing and I regret not having paid you a last visit before I’d left.”

These new forms of grieving erode traditional American boundaries between public and private, and the living and the dead. But in fact, this manner of mourning is really old. Public mourning and maintaining connection with the dead were big in ancient Greece (as they are in other countries today). Funerals were spectacles during the archaic period, the 8th to 6th centuries BCE. Mourning was part theater, part opportunity to show off, and part power play. Aristocratic factions made sumptuous displays of their wealth. Groups of women sang dirges over the body of the deceased in elaborate choral performances. Rival families competed to outdo each other with offering baskets to the family of the deceased.

Greek mourners also spoke directly to the dead. In the laments that survive, women directly address their deceased male kin because those relationships gave women their identity in the first place. In Homer’s Iliad, after Patroclus, Achilles’ closest and dearest companion, is killed, a crowd of women sing lamentations. Briseis (Achilles’ war captive) begins. She has watched her entire family die; she has been given over to Achilles to live as a slave. But Patroclus was always kind to her. She will miss his gentle nature, the way in which he provided comfort in a war-torn world. Her lament is a way of readjusting to a world in which he will no longer offer this solace. She mourns the death of a part of herself.

When I read my friends’ Facebook posts about Prince and David Bowie, I hear similar sounds of Greek lament. We tell the world that in our morose teenage years, we were consoled by listening to “Ziggy Stardust.” We remember dancing to “Raspberry Beret” as a bright spot in a tough summer. We mourn the loss of those who shaped us, who provided kindness in a complicated world. We mourn the death of a part of ourselves.

Prince and Bowie were cultural icons who, among their many contributions, questioned typical gender roles. When we listened to their music, we could step outside of ourselves for a little while. Our public manner of mourning these particular figures recognizes (and reveals a kind of nostalgia for) their revolutionary approach to gender 30 years ago. It honors the new ways of resisting constraints on being male or being female that these performers embodied. As we mourn them, we celebrate their subversive messages.

Ancient Greek funerals also carried subversive undertones. Funerals allowed women an opportunity to step outside of their traditional roles. Women had few political rights or even independent identities and funerals were pretty much their only opportunity for public self-expression, so they made the most of them. Ancient tragedies (the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides) feature mourning women using their laments as a means of resistance to those in authority. In Euripides’ Helen, Helen (of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships) stages a massive funeral in order to escape the clutches of the evil king Theoclymenus; she pretends to be mourning her husband, Menelaus, who is actually alive, and manages to flee in the boat provided for her feigned funeral practices.

When we post in mourning on Facebook for a celebrity, to some extent we are permitted to step outside of our regular role and display a connection with someone we don’t know. Mourning on Facebook offers us a chance to do something we couldn’t otherwise do. Prince’s family isn’t going to let me go to his funeral. Nor is David Bowie’s.

Like the Greeks, we also sometimes struggle for control over the memory of our heroes. For the ancient Greeks, a hero was an intermediary figure between mortal and immortal, one who had the power to help friends and harm enemies from beyond the grave. The thing is, you usually needed the dead body of the hero buried in your territory in order to make use of its powers. If a deceased individual was deemed a hero, a struggle over the corpse could ensue.

A classic hero in this sense of the term was Oedipus as portrayed in Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus. Because an oracle said his dead body would bring victory in war, his hometown of Thebes tried to get control over his corpse even before he died. To spite them, Oedipus died in Colonus, after announcing that his cold corpse would drink the Thebans’ warm blood. Greek stories include other conflicts over corpses, as when the Spartans stole the body of Orestes to take advantage of his military powers.

Recently, my friends have stopped sharing links about Prince and the Muppets and shifted to posting articles on opiate addiction. Are we digging up Prince’s body and moving it to Sparta when we emphasize his possible struggles with pain and pills?

Of course, times have changed since Ancient Greece. Back then, the state was not a fan of funerals, which sometimes launched disruptive blood vendettas. Grief had the potential to morph into revenge. Think of Procne who, after taking revenge on her husband (he had raped her sister, Philomela, and then cut out Philomela’s tongue), kills her own son, Itys, feeds him to her husband, and is subsequently turned into a nightingale, forever lamenting the death of her son (she sings “Itys, Itys, Itys”). The potential for a funeral to kick off chaos led the Greek state to curtail women’s mourning rights.

In 2016, though, city governments have an entirely different way of dealing with mourning. They use purple lights to show that they’re friendly, that they care, that they’d like to join the cry party. That’s not very Greek at all!

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