> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.missingwitches.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Ep 306 MW Queen Himiko - The Sacred Was Entangled With Survival - URL: https://www.missingwitches.com/ep-306-mw-queen-himiko-the-sacred-was-entangled-with-survival/ - Published: 2026-10-08T14:57:54.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T14:57:53.000Z - Description: I call in the woman in the forest, hearing something enormous moving behind the veil. - Author: Risa Dickens - Tags: Podcast, Missing Witches, Art Witchcraft Who was Himiko, the mysterious shaman-queen who ruled somewhere in the Japanese archipelago almost two thousand years ago? The Chinese *Wei Zhi* describes a woman who became ruler after years of conflict, brought peace, practised magic, and was attended by a thousand women. She heard the gods, and people listened. We don't know exactly where her kingdom of Yamatai was. But whether we imagine her among the sacred mountains of the Nara basin or in the maritime ritual landscape of northern Kyushu, Himiko opens a strange and compelling question about women, magic and power. Because what happens when a our leaders claim exclusive access to the divine? What happenes where our longing for a connection with spirit takes us far away from each other? In this episode, I follow Himiko through archaeology, sacred landscapes, goddess worship, mirrors, mountains, agricultural history, power and violence. I find myself wanting things from Himiko, and tracing how she has been instrumentalized. I find myself dreaming alongside the story of Japan's founding Shaman Queen of a timeplace where the mountain is sacred, the mirror catches the sun, and nobody has to surrender their mind to connect with the divine, or in order to belong. This is a season of sovereignty - in a time where it’s crucial we draw the borders around ourselves and say we are a sovereign nation, mine is a sovereign body, our rights are sacred - it felt urgent to dig for stories of women who used magic to lead their people, it felt right to conjure the Witch Queens. And ok, listen, we love the word witch, there’s a fuck you in it these days that’s delicious, but just because we play with it doesn’t mean we are actually claiming these people would have understood themselves as witches or that the word meant the same thing to them as it does to us. We are the missing witches, we have been longing for more intersectional magic, for more layers and complicated stories so we are endlessly turning with reverence to stories of women and queer people beyond our white settler colonizer culture and we know we’ll inevitably be clunky and biased and we’re coming anyway, arms full of awe and love, just trying to not fuck it up too much. ## I call in Himiko. The Shaman Queen Himiko was a 3rd-century ruler of a powerful federation in ancient Japan called Yamatai. Kids in Japan today learn about Himiko, she’s part of the origin story of the nation. She helped make it a place, she wove its destiny into the sun. We know she used sacred bronze mirrors to reflect and communicate with spirit, and archeologists still find them in tombs and passionately debate what it means that these mirrors are here or there, where did she actually live, who did she confer power to, what did the mirror actually do? We know she read the cracking of bones. We don't know exactly where Yamatai was. Some scholars place it in northern Kyushu; another influential tradition places it in the Yamato region, in what is now Nara Prefecture. It’s easy to picture the birth of the spiritual nation of Japan in Nara, and to see Himiko there, talking to the sun. Nara is a place where Japan's sacred geography gathers itself: mountains and thunder, deer and mirrors, spirits and emperors, forests and gods. Centuries after Himiko, in 768, according to the weaving of spirit stories, mythology and history that we sometimes call legend, the thunder deity arrived at the sacred mountain of Mikasa riding a mythical white deer to protect the new capital. The deer of Nara became sacred messengers, shinroku, and remained protected for centuries. To kill one was punishable by death at times. They lost this protection during the furious modernization of the 19th century, when the old sacred order of things was dismantled and remade. Today the tiny, genetically distinct deer are protected again, and Nara is one of the places on earth where humans and wild animals live together in a negotiated peace that comes from our species seeing theirs as sacred. The mountain forest has been protected since the 9thC, the trees and the ground belong to Shinto Gods, and so it is considered a primeval forest, untouched by industry for over 1000 years, the forest is dominated by a dense, multi-tiered canopy of giant, centuries-old broadleaf evergreens, oaks, beeches, and ancient cedars. I have a dream of travelling the world to sit with old growth forests. I like to imagine these places holding alight a healing logic that can spread through stories and podcasts that awkwardly whisper of distant mythologies and possible worlds and seep into us all and awaken us to a world view where all of the world is sacred. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/b0/b2/b0b2b0c5-0324-4ded-8c78-fb468356e3e1/content/images/2026/10/narasSacredDeer_002.jpg) [Nara's Sacred Deer](https://www.visitnara.jp/venues/S01487/?ref=missingwitches.com) Anyway, we can imagine a continuum. Four hundred years before Nara became the imperial capital in 710, this region was a cradle of the spiritual and political worlds that would eventually become Japan. The forest was already thousands of years old. And at the southern edge of the Nara Basin rises Mount Miwa. At Ōmiwa Shrine at the base of Mount Miwa, one of Japan's oldest sacred sites, there is no honden, no central sanctuary in which the deity's spirit is housed. Instead, the mountain is the sacred body, the shintai. You don't go into the shrine to find the divine. The land isn’t a backdrop. The land is the sacred story. ## The land isn’t a backdrop. And maybe it was somewhere here that Himiko walked and listened to the sun as it filtered down through ancient trees. There’s another possibility: that Himiko was not in Nara at all, but in northern Kyushu, where a major school of archaeological thought places Yamatai. If we see her there, the spiritual landscape changes. This was a world oriented toward the sea, the sun, rice, weather, mountains and the dangerous passage between the Japanese islands and the Asian continent. At places like Okinoshima, offerings were left among enormous sacred rocks for the protection of sailors and the success of journeys and diplomacy; later traditions would associate this landscape with the worship of three female sea deities. Bronze mirrors, including the kind associated with Himiko's diplomatic relationship with Wei, appear in elite burials across the region — objects that caught and returned the light of the sun. **Everywhere, everywhere, the sacred was entangled with survival**, this is the mycelial mat beneath the concrete quiet of modernity: water for the rice, weather for the harvest, the sea for passage, iron and bronze for tools and weapons, the land singing, vibrating with forces to be honoured and negotiated with. I feel them here, when I’m all wired from my todolists and second morning coffee, but I walk around the property to get to my new 4ft by 4ft studio and I hear the voice of the indigenous elder I saw on a CBC doc who when asked how we can reconnect with the spirit in the land said smiled and said, eat outside. So I do. I find a dry place and sit down and slowly the ringing of the electrical energy leaves me and I eat my food and the air send over by the trees, ionized by the lake and **everything everything changes in me**. If Himiko ruled from here, I can see a queen, a shaman, and a woman whose political authority emerged from a much older world of goddess worship, where the forces that governed human life were feminine, elemental and everywhere around you. The Chinese *Wei Zhi*, compiled in the late 3rd century, tells us that Himiko became queen of Wa after decades of warfare and brought a period of peace. It describes her as practicing magic and sorcery, ruling through spiritual authority. She was surrounded by 1,000 female attendants. Only one man was permitted to see her, her younger brother helped carry her proclamations to the outside world. She was secluded. She spoke with spirits. She reflected the sun in holy mirrors. And only she could hear the voices. **Pyro-osteomancy** (divination by fire and bone)—was a major state ritual. Before the introduction of Chinese turtle-shell divination (plastromancy), early Japanese diviners used animal bones, especally the scapulae (shoulder blades) of deer. Grooves were carved into the bone, and a heated rod or twig was applied. The shaman would interpret the resulting cracks to predict weather, crop success, or military strategy. Historical Chinese texts (like the Records of the Three Kingdoms) note that Queen Himiko practices magic and sorcery, they talk bewitching the people, they speak of the demon way. Ritual bone-cracking and mirror-gazing were central to how she communicated with spirits to guide her kingdom. I can feel what I call witchcraft in this story - what we think of as a meeting place of spirituality, activism, politics, and art. How she performed her rituals and gathered her celebrants and saw a way forward and spoke it into being. I can also feel the temptation to use her, stories are instruments, stories are tools. I wanted to find in Himiko a shamanism I could connect to the mountain, to the land, to a time when people might have shared resources and loved and adored the world energy that offered them food and water. I wanted a way of mapping this shaman queen onto a liberatory idea of my own witchcraft: women of the woods with sacred deer, ruling in peace, piercing the veil of the material world with ancient mirrors reflecting the sun, speaking of our relationship with the light itself. I wanted her. I have to admit my bias, my grasping thoughts. ## I wanted her. I have to notice the way I can't help but instrumentalize stories sometimes. Though I want to find stories that help, stories and ideas and lives that might arrive with a spark of hope, something I can offer myself and you, listener, here in the coven we create in the dark between our ears, something we can use, to have power, to get free, and I have to flag that yearning, using desire that is not so different from consumption, from the way imperialist misogynist patriarchy has us wired to use women. The use each other. I don’t know what to do with this except to tell the truth about it, the trip wires and tensions. The most powerful spell is to tell the truth, I believe that even if it doesn’t give me a banging episode arc. And the truth about Himiko is more complicated than the witch queen I wanted. It becomes even more complicated when I look at what’s been done to her, the layered ways over thousands of years she’s been fetishized and translated, puppeted and played with and used. In *Rebranding Himiko The Shaman Queen of Ancient History*, Laura Miller writes “Some manga and anime creators portray Himiko as a presumptuous tyrant, promiscuous sorceress, or vain hag unworthy of power. At first glance these disparate perceptions seem to have no relationship to each other. Was Himiko a diabolical dictator, a talented witch, or an adorable shrine attendant? Do people see in Himiko a sexy manipulator or a spiritual mastermind? Interpretations vary depending on the goals and attitudes held by creators of her image, particularly their ideas about female power. (...) As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich pointed out, the figure of Joan of Arc has been many things across the years, including witch, virgin, heretic, whore, transvestite, peasant, and saint.1 A woman demonized in one era might be venerated in another. Himiko also reflects this type of shifting assessment, often holding contrasting personas within the same time period.” A woman with extraordinary spiritual authority is dangerous. She can be made into a goddess Or a monster. A defiler, a pure instrument. She can be given every ugly quality we fear in powerful women and then held up as proof that women should never have that much power in the first place. The historical record gives us so little of her actual personality. The woman we know is an outline of a political and spiritual figure, and she gets sketched and painted over and over and over, tarted up and filled in. She becomes sorceress. The old priestess. The beautiful young woman. The vain woman. The erotic woman. The mascot. The tarot figure. The manga character. The video game character. The national ancestor. The tourist icon. A woman who ruled becomes a screen onto which everyone else projects an idea. There is a 1974 film by Masahiro Shinoda called *Himiko*, a strange, beautiful, feverish reimagining of the ancient queen. It isn't a historical reconstruction. It is a film about myth, conquest, religion, sexuality and the making of Japan, looking backward from the anxieties of modern Japan. The Himiko in this film is jealous. She’s sexually possessive. She’s hungry for power. She falls in love with her half-brother, Takehiko, and when she discovers that he’s also fucked Adahime, one of the women who serves Himiko, she has him arrested, tortured and banished. Eventually he’s killed. The film imagines a conflict between the people of the Sun God and people who worship the land, the mountains, the water, animals and the earth. Himiko is the voice of the Sun God. She’s the one who hears the divine instructions. Enraged at her brother-lover, she turns against the gods of the mountain and the land. She declares that her people have no use for these old gods, no need to see divinity in insects, animals, snakes, fields or mountains. And in this telling it’s a man who tells her to hide herself away, and in this way to make herself a god. Violence rages and she’s depicted pushed into the old man oral sex while the land people are hunted. The woman I wanted to imagine as a forest witch becomes, in this telling, an agent of separation from the living world. And then the whole thing collapses. Takehiko and Adahime are ambushed and killed by soldiers, and their bodies are brought back to Himiko. She’s devastated. Her advisor Nashime decides that she’s gone mad, lost divine authority, he frees the Mountain God people she had imprisoned. They rape, torture and kill her. And then, almost immediately, the system replaces her: a young girl is installed as the new prophetess, another body through which spiritual authority can be channelled into political order. The cycle continues, but the film doesn't end there. Years later, an old Nashime wanders through the forest, still haunted by Himiko, when the ancient world is suddenly shattered by the sound of a helicopter. The camera pulls back and the forest becomes a tiny keyshaped island of wilderness sitting on top of an ancient burial mound, surrounded by roads, factories, offices and suburban houses. The gods, the queens, the mountains, the violence, the political compromises — all of it is here beneath the world we have built, haunting the empty lots and keyholes. Feminist historians have pointed out that Himiko complicates the assumption that political sovereignty in ancient Japan was naturally, obviously, always male. She’s the earliest documented ruler we have of a large region of the Japanese archipelago, and her rule may be part of a longer history of women exercising political authority through religious power, what the film depicts is true at least in this - the violence that followed her death only subsided when a young girl directly related to Himiko was accepted by the people as their leader. I wish we had *her* story. But even when women rule, history keeps finding ways to leave out those years, and when they do record them they put a man in the sentence. Her brother. The men who interpreted her authority. The men who conquered, administered, fetishized, erased her. And when a woman becomes difficult, sticky, troublesome, recurring "like tides like leaves," as Diane DiPrima wrote, impossible to remove from the story, we make her exceptional, inhuman. A strange woman. A dangerous woman. A seductress.. A madwoman. A goddess. A witch. It’s hard to see a political actor, a spiritual practitioner, a peacemaker, a strategist, someone who ruled but didn’t want the spotlight, who retreated into the world of the bronze mirrors and burnt shoulder blade bones and what they showed her. I don't want to romanticize her, but I also don't want to participate in the old trick of making powerful women legible only through their deviations from femininity. Maybe she was jealous. Maybe she was ruthless. Maybe she was compassionate. Maybe she was none of these things in any way we would recognize. We don't know. The record is so thin, so threadbare. We know people followed her. **Her spiritual authority mattered.** She brought peace after a long period of brutal violence and conflict, years when people could raise children, could make food, could read and watch the stars and pray to the sun or the trees, could listen to each other, weave, make art, don’t underestimate the brilliance, the sacredness of a single day of peace. When she died, she was buried in an enormous mound, and the *Wei Zhi* says that a hundred people were sacrificed at her burial. Here again the witch I want begins to dissolve into violence and icon-making. Because this isn’t just a story of a wise woman living in communion with the land and leading her people toward peace. It’s a story about power. The kind that can stop wars, but also reify class structures and pile bodies in useless sacrifice. The kind that can make a woman a symbol of liberation for people thousands of years later while she may, herself, have ruled through systems of profound hierarchy. Himiko sits at a lynchpin moment in the formation of political power in Japan. The old landscape of communities, agriculture and ritual was changing. As rice agriculture developed, food could be stored. Labour could be organized on a larger scale. Irrigation, roads, bridges, fields and other infrastructure could be built. The people who organized these things could accumulate different kinds, shapes, structures, uses of power. Of domination. This is one of the oldest transformations modern historians have traced in human political life: when food can be stored, whoever controls the storehouse acquires a mantle, a layer, a resonance of power that extends outward and marks the relations around them and inward shaping how they see themselves and behave. I don't want to make this too neat. Rice didn’t cause hierarchy. Agriculture didn’t automatically create patriarchy. Human societies aren't that simple, I don’t think. But one thing is clear, surplus changes relationships. Wealth distorts attitudes and behaviors towards others, we see the extreme resolution of this disordered thinking raging unchecked across the planet today as we are collectively brutalized by the psychopathy of billionaires. ## we are collectively brutalized by the psychopathy of billionaires. In the centuries before Himiko looked at the dancing light of the sun cast by her mirror and saw a way to peace, the people who could organize the growing and storage of food became chiefs. Chiefs could accumulate privilege. Metal and weapons could be gathered. Warfare intensified. And eventually power could become something more than practical. It could become unquestionable. It could become divine. Those in power could use the divine to hold and gain power. The *Wei Zhi* tells us that the communities of Wa had suffered decades of warfare before they agreed upon Himiko as their ruler. A woman with spiritual authority became the solution to a political crisis. The people didn't simply choose a queen. They accepted a woman who could stand outside ordinary political life. Himiko's power was inseparable from her distance from everyone else. She was purified, secluded, surrounded by women, hidden from men. Her brother spoke for her. She communicated with the spirits. Her authority couldn’t be debated in the ordinary sense because the source of her authority was somewhere beyond ordinary human argument. And it worked. For decades, there was peace. Her name travelled across the sea. The Chinese Wei dynasty treated her as the ruler of all Wa. We know about her in part because someone outside the islands wrote her down. The woman who may have been one of the most important political figures of early Japan survives in history in large part because another civilization thought she was worth recording. And let’s sidenote in classic Missing Witches deviation to say - if the people around you can’t see you clearly, if standing in your shadow they can’t see your true shape and importance, please remember Himiko coming to us from Chinese historians across centuries, imagine how gracefully grand you are when seen at a distance, the mark you make is so much larger than this place where you stand today. Imagine your works, in the material world or in spirit, echoing across distances and generations, witches ok? and don’t let the small hurts of those closest to you break the skin. Maybe you are a heroine in the local bee culture, maybe the beech trees sing your name, why not live as though it’s possible so long as it’s beautiful? One thing we know about Himiko is that she was isolated from the people, and it seems this is how eventually things fell apart. She went too far afield, she lost the authority over the different chiefs because they couldn’t connect with her and hear her wisdom directly from her, maybe she was kept from them on purpose and instrumentalized by men who wanted her spiritual authority without the messiness of what an oracle actually tells you about yourself, maybe she just got tired of the mundane world and focused her practice on dancing with the light, who knows. We know Himiko represents a time when spiritual authority and political sovereignty could become almost indistinguishable. Her rule wasn't democratic. There was no expectation that everyone should have access to the voices she heard. There was no open-source archive of her revelations for the community to examine. Her authority came precisely from being singular, and that made her message susceptible to distortion. And I don't want that. I don't want to live in a world where one person hears the gods and everyone else has to obey. ## I don't want to live in a world where one person hears the gods and everyone else has to obey. I don't want a magical life where all my choices come from tea leaves or the voices only I can hear when I am purified and alone. I want to hear those voices AND I want to be in community. I want a coven to check me when I make mistakes. I want people to ground me even if it hurts because I want to flourish in the material world too, be a good mom and citizen even if I live way on the outskirts of town, and I want to avoid the siren traps of magical practice that can distort our eager trusting minds into spiritual psychosis or conspiracy fear or loneliness or greed. I want to share sources and examine what's worked for other people. I want open bureaucratic systems and open-source policy. I want something like common ground, fertile with all kinds of interrelated plants and bacteria and fungi, each organism changing the conditions for the others. I want a fertility like Doreen Valiente describes: a fertility to create and thrive and be happy. ## I want the oracle to have neighbours. I want the person who says, that’s not what I hear. I want the person who brings another source. I want the person who says, What if we're wrong? This doesn't mean I don’t want magic. The opposite. I want magic free from purity culture. I want to call upon the fierce shamanic connection of Himiko to the Sun, the sovereignty of her vision, and the way she originates a whole world, an era of peace and prosperity, a nation, through her own acumen and political authority and spiritual practices and deep listening. I want this for each of us. I want us to call forth our own sovereign power, to feel ecstasy, to hear poetry, to dance with deer in the woods, to speak clearly and to call in exactly what we see and need to bring about our own eras and places of peace. But I also want a life with less fucking pressure than being a solitary instrument for exclusive messages from gods. I want fact checkers please, not just spirit guides and Akashic records. People are drawn to witchcraft, like people are drawn to other forms of religion, because they long for meaning and control. Sometimes they come to witchcraft at a breaking point. Sometimes invisible forces seem suddenly visible. Sometimes demons seem to be everywhere. Sometimes a person can see a logic that no one else can see, and that logic can torment them. A spiritual experience can be meaningful, eye opening, life changing, uplifting, empowering. It can also become frightening, disorganizing, coercive. We know ancient cultures all over the world practiced human sacrifice. To me, this is a trace of our species' extraordinary ability to lose our collective minds, to convince ourselves that goodness could somehow come from the loss of another person. We can make almost anything sacred. We can put a crown on an idea and then call whatever happens beneath it necessary. We have sacrificed people and the living world to gods. We have sacrificed people and the living world to nations. We have sacrificed people and the living world to purity, progress, tradition, revolution. And in our own era we see the same ancient hunger for certainty: the conviction that a god, a nation, a movement, a leader, a prophecy could somehow benefit from the suffering of another. That children can be hunted or used. That a powerful man can be forgiven anything because he has wealth and wealth somehow confers value like ancient chiefs hoarding rice, raping their wives, and calling themselves divine. The danger isn't that we believe in spirits. The danger is that we become so certain that our spirit is the only one speaking. So I call in Himiko. I call in the woman in the forest, hearing something enormous moving behind the veil. I call in the mirror catching sunlight. I call in the deer. I call in the mountain that isn't a symbol for the divine but the body of it. I call in the old knowledge that the world is alive and that we are not separate from it. But I don't want her alone. I want the thousand women who walked with her, and I want good men too, and all the genderqueer and trans and nonbinary people, I want witches all around us. ## I want witches all around us. I want the argument, the evidence, the ecstatic vision, and the fucking bureaucracy the grants medicare and affordable daycare and shit like building regulations so the roof doesn’t come down, and I want, the fungi, the bacteria, the roots talking underground. I want magic that doesn't require surrendering our minds, or the wisdom of our cultures and our sciences accumulating over hundreds of years. I want a witchcraft where sovereignty doesn't mean that nobody can question you. I want sovereignty to mean that you remain responsible for what you do with what you hear. Maybe that's the spell I was actually looking for in Himiko. Not a woman who proves that witches once ruled. Not proof that the ancient world was secretly egalitarian, or that every woman who spoke to spirits was a liberator. Something more awkwardly truthful, like a reminder that humans have always had ways to speak with what is larger than ourselves, and that this guidance - whether it’s from inside our bodies or beyond the known universe - can uplift us in our workings towards sovereignty, AND ALSO a reminder that the moment we make any one person (even ourselves) the sole interpreter of that larger thing, magic can become power, and power can become unquestionable, and unquestionable power can become a distortion that robs us of each other and of that most precious sovereignty, a clear mind. The mountain remains. The deer still walk through the city. The sun still catches in the mirror. My bones creak and crack beneath my weight and in them I hear transmissions from my body which is divine, because everything is. And somewhere between the solitary witch and the collective, between the voice of the spirit and the voice of the person beside us, we’re learning how to listen. From my mouth to your ears, or your eyes or finger tips I decree it with my reckless holy self-ordained sovereignty - we’re getting closer. So be it, see to it. And blessed fucking be. --- ### **Further Reading** Kidder, J. Edward, Jr. *Himiko and Japan’s Elusive Chiefdom of Yamatai: Archaeology, History, and Mythology*. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007.[https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/himiko-and-japans-elusive-chiefdom-of-yamatai-archaeology-history-and-mythology/](https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/himiko-and-japans-elusive-chiefdom-of-yamatai-archaeology-history-and-mythology/?ref=missingwitches.com) Miller, Laura. “Searching for Charisma Queen Himiko.” In *Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanese Cultural History*, edited by Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland, 51–76\. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018.[https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/33421/chapter-abstract/287505805](https://academic.oup.com/california-scholarship-online/book/33421/chapter-abstract/287505805?ref=missingwitches.com) Mizoguchi, Koji. *The Archaeology of Japan: From the Earliest Rice Farming Villages to the Rise of the State*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.[https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/archaeology-of-japan/7F8A94050E3FB58708501B8C9B8DA1DA](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/archaeology-of-japan/7F8A94050E3FB58708501B8C9B8DA1DA?ref=missingwitches.com) Shinoda, Masahiro, director. *Himiko*. 1974\. Japan.[https://www.criterionchannel.com/himiko](https://www.criterionchannel.com/himiko?ref=missingwitches.com) UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Sacred Island of Okinoshima and Associated Sites in the Munakata Region.”[https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1535](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1535?ref=missingwitches.com) Yoshie, Akiko, Hitomi Tonomura, and Azumi Ann Takata. “Gendered Interpretations of Female Rule: The Case of Himiko, Ruler of Yamatai.” *U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal*, no. 44 (2013): 3–23.[https://www.jstor.org/stable/42771843](https://www.jstor.org/stable/42771843?ref=missingwitches.com)