This document covers the background of East Asian magical tradition as it exists in the game's setting.
Origins
The earliest organized magical tradition in China traces by convention to the court of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi), who received cosmological knowledge from celestial emissaries. The text Huangdi Sijing preserves fragments of this transmission. Whether this represents contact with the same non-human teachers who instructed Mesopotamian magicians, or an independent transmission, is a genuinely unresolved question in comparative occult scholarship with serious adherents on both sides.
The first surviving institutional magical lineage in China is the Tianshi Dao (Celestial Masters), founded by Zhang Daoling in 142 CE following a claimed revelation from a deified Laozi. Where Mesopotamian and later European traditions treated magical practice as scholarly and priestly work, Zhang's school developed something more distinctive: a bureaucratic model in which spirits were addressed through formal petitions using the administrative language of the Han Dynasty imperial court. Magical work was official work — the practitioner acted as a licensed functionary within a hierarchy of spiritual authority. This model became the template for nearly all subsequent Chinese magical institutions.
The most significant alchemical tradition was compiled by Ge Hong (283–343 CE), a scholar-general who assembled the Baopuzi as an explicit preservation effort. Ge Hong named his sources, described competing lineages, and treated his compilation as knowledge at serious risk of being lost. Without his work, pre-Tang alchemical practice would be largely unrecoverable.
Japanese magical tradition absorbed Chinese cosmological frameworks during the Nara period (710–794 CE), when the Tang court system was adopted wholesale. Onmyōdō — the Way of Yin and Yang — became the official court tradition. The imperial Onmyōryō, established under the Taihō Code of 701 CE, administered it through hereditary specialists called Onmyōji. The most celebrated was Abe no Seimei (921–1005 CE); his descendants, the Tsuchimikado clan, administered court Onmyōdō continuously until the Meiji Restoration. A parallel esoteric tradition arrived through Kūkai (774–835 CE), who returned from Tang China with Shingon Buddhist practice — explicitly a magical discipline with ritual and initiatory structure, not only a contemplative one.
Korean tradition drew on both Chinese frameworks and an older independent shamanic practice. The musok tradition of female shamans (mudang) predates Buddhist and Confucian influence in Korea and maintained continuous practice through centuries of court patronage, neglect, and intermittent suppression.
The Imperial Period
Tang (618–907 CE) and Song (960–1279 CE) imperial patronage was the height of institutional Daoist practice, but it came with registration requirements and an expectation of court service. Practitioners outside licensed frameworks — independent exorcists, unaffiliated spirit-workers, female shamans — operated in legal gray areas that could close without warning.
The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) imposed systematic licensing. The Tianshi lineage was brought under imperial registry at Longhu Mountain in Jiangxi Province; only credentialed Daoist priests could legally practice. Unregistered practitioners were classified under the same statutes used to suppress heterodox sects and organized political resistance. Magic was not banned; it was licensed, and the license was held by the throne.
The Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) added ethnic suspicion to religious regulation. The Manchu-led government was particularly hostile to Han Chinese sectarian organizations — the White Lotus Society and related networks that combined millenarian religion with magical practice — because these had historically organized armed resistance. The suppression of the White Lotus Rebellion (1796–1804) destroyed regional magical networks that had survived the Ming transition intact.
In Japan, the Onmyōryō was not a ceremonial body. The Tsuchimikado clan licensed practitioners, adjudicated disputes, and maintained the ritual calendar that governed court life. Their authority was real and exercised.
The Cascade
The forces that dismantled European supernatural dynasties arrived in East Asia through a different mechanism. The Enlightenment came not as a native philosophical movement but as colonial pressure — rationalist modernity packaged alongside Western military and commercial power, arriving with the ships that forced open treaty ports. The ideological effect was the same as in Europe, but the wound was different: in Europe, the Enlightenment was something the dominant culture did to itself. In East Asia, it arrived from outside, carried by powers that had already broken their own supernatural old orders at home.
The Meiji Restoration (1868) was the sharpest rupture in the region. The new Japanese government's Shinbutsu bunri policy forced the separation of Shinto and Buddhist practice and dismantled Onmyōdō's institutional infrastructure in a single administrative stroke. The Onmyōryō was abolished. The Tsuchimikado clan lost their authority. What had been a licensed court tradition with real judicial power became a historical artifact without institutional cover. This was deliberate: the Meiji government understood that it was eliminating a competing power structure.
In China, the Qing Dynasty's weakening through the 19th century removed the regulatory framework that had channeled and contained magical practice. This did not liberate practitioners — it exposed them to a more chaotic repression. The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) brought the contradiction into the open: practitioners who had operated at the margins of official sanction found themselves mobilized in an anti-colonial uprising, then crushed by the foreign alliance that suppressed it. The lesson drawn on all sides was that magical practice and modern state power were incompatible.
The fall of the Qing in 1912 and the May Fourth Movement (1919) — explicitly rationalist and anti-traditional — completed the ideological work in China. By the 1920s no Chinese intellectual or political framework offered a legitimate place for institutional magical practice. What survived did so without defenders.
By the end of World War II, the process that had completed itself in Europe reached its terminus in East Asia as well. Japan's imperial order collapsed in 1945. The founding of the People's Republic in 1949, with its explicitly materialist program, eliminated whatever remained of institutional sanction in China. Korea's division in 1950 cut the peninsula into two radically different regulatory environments. No supernatural entity openly held political power anywhere in the region.
Current Affairs
China. The People's Republic treats organized magical practice as a security matter handled by an unnamed unit within the Ministry of State Security. The Tianshi lineage maintains its seat at Longhu Mountain under PRC supervision. This arrangement is not purely nominal: the lineage holds knowledge and commands loyalties the PRC cannot simply abolish without cost, and both parties understand this. The PRC is not the lineage's patron; it is the power that has decided the lineage is more useful contained than destroyed. Independent practitioners — rural exorcists in Fujian and Hunan, urban talisman-makers operating through commercial fronts — are tolerated as long as they remain unorganized. Any network with the density of an independent institution is broken up.
Japan. No Japanese agency publicly acknowledges responsibility for magical governance. In practice, a small operational unit within the Public Security Intelligence Agency (公安調査庁) handles containment work. Separately, a loose network of Onmyōji practitioners — referred to in agency files as the Kurayashiro (Shadow Shrine) — maintains its own containment practices and does not coordinate with the government unit. The Kurayashiro holds that the agency lacks the competence to manage what it monitors; the agency holds that the Kurayashiro is an unaccountable private actor operating in sensitive territory. Neither is entirely wrong.
South Korea. The most formally organized arrangement in the region. Division 77, a unit within the National Intelligence Service, monitors magical events and maintains working relationships with the international containment system. South Korean musok practitioners operate legally as folk religious practitioners; Division 77 distinguishes between those who are working magic and those who are not, and manages the former.
North Korea. No verified information. Division 77 and the Japanese agency maintain assessment files. The most credible reports describe a state-controlled ritual program, but its structure, scope, and current operational status are not confirmed.
Key Concepts and Terms
Tianshi Dao (Celestial Masters) — The oldest surviving Chinese magical lineage, founded by Zhang Daoling in 142 CE. Developed the bureaucratic petition model that became the template for later Daoist magical institutions. Headquartered at Longhu Mountain in Jiangxi Province; currently operates under PRC oversight.
Onmyōdō — The Way of Yin and Yang; the Japanese court magical tradition, institutionalized under the Onmyōryō in 701 CE. Administered by the Tsuchimikado clan until the Meiji Restoration abolished the Onmyōryō in 1868. Private practice continued in fragmented form. The Kurayashiro is its most organized modern descendant.
Musok — The Korean shamanic tradition, practiced by hereditary or vocationally-called female specialists (mudang). Predates Buddhist and Confucian influence. Currently legal in South Korea as folk religion; monitored by Division 77.
Division 77 — The South Korean intelligence unit responsible for magical containment and monitoring, operating within the National Intelligence Service. The most cooperative partner the international containment system has in East Asia.
The Kurayashiro (Shadow Shrine) — An informal network of Onmyōji practitioners in Japan that maintains independent containment practices. Named in Public Security Intelligence Agency files. Does not coordinate with the government unit and does not officially exist.