A fantastic surprise lurks in an old issue of Black Belt magazine: Did winged goblins teach the ninja and the samurai? Author John Lindsey traces the martial mythos of the terrible Tengu, spiced with some Ancient Astronaut style pondering which echoes writers like Vaughn M. Greene and W. Raymond Drake:
‘‘Tengu’’ are vampires that rage in the air. Each lives on his own mountain peak. Were they remnants of the old Gods? The giant Tengu “‘So Jo Bo’’ appeared to Ushi-Kawa and taught him the art of writing. These proud beings are divided in two groups. The ‘‘Officers'' wear red robes, have long noses, and long, matted hair. When Admiral Perry first landed in Japan, he was drawn by a Japanese artist like a Tengu. Other Tengu—the ‘‘soldiers’’—have bird heads (space helmets?) and wings. Tengu hold secret conventions in remote mountain valleys, like those the early Jomon inhabited.
Meanwhile, Drake in Gods and Spacemen of the Ancient East had this to say about the Tengu:
The ‘exceedingly long nose’ of the ‘winged creature in human form’ no doubt referred to some headpiece with breathing apparatus, for to some Extra-terrestriala our oxygenated atmosphere may be poisonous; we are reminded of Oannes, a Being with the body of a fish, who according to Berossus taught the Babylonians the arts of civilisation, his likeness to a fish probably denoted the Stranger was wearing a Spacesuit, perhaps one of those Jomon Dogu ‘pressure suits’ reproduced in the various statuettes found all over Japan? Since the long-nosed winged creature gave rise to a superstition it would suggest that his manifestations in the mountains of Japan were not infrequent throughout several centuries showing regular surveillance of the Children of the Sun.
This article is also available to read and download at archive dot org.
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| Rack 'em! |
From Black Belt magazine, Vol. 27 - No. 3, March 1989.
