Images of Nature in Mononoke Hime and Macbeth

San is the sun: Princess Mononoke,
Macbeth and Images of Severed Heads
and Green Forests
“In all things, it is the Beginning and End that are interesting.”
---Yoshida Kenko, from Tsurezuregusa (1330-2)
Mononoke Hime(1998) is one of Miyazaki Hayao’s most famous and successful films, while
Macbeth(1606) is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and successful plays. It would seem that two
works so far apart in time, one an environmental fantasy, the other a tragedy about an ambitious king,
would have not much in common except that they both start with M, but Miyazaki and Shakespeare are
both environmentalists and systems thinkers as well as entertainers and writers. A comparison of some
techniques and imagery in both Mononoke Hime and Macbeth helps to understand just how similar their
strategies and artistic aims are. Both works feature much attention paid to the sun. Both have spreading
green forests. And both have severed heads.
In Mononoke Hime, the severed head belongs to the Spirit of the Forest (called the Shishi Gami),
who resembles a large stag but has many more antlers than a usual stag (the extra antlers look like the
sun’s rays). His head is cut off when Lady Eboshi cries “I’m going to show you how to kill a god!” as
she fires her gun at the Shishi Gami’s neck. Leading up to this episode, in the background of the action

is the desire of Lady Eboshi to do away with the Shishi Gami in order to cut down trees in the forest and
expand the town of Tatara Ba and its wealth:
Eboshi asks if Ashitaka is willing to stay at Tatara Ba and work for her.
Ashitaka asks her if she is going to take even the forest of Shishi Gami.
Eboshi: "Once we let the light into the forest, and suppress the wolves, this
will become a rich country.”1
After the Shishi Gami (also called Didarabocchi at night) is beheaded---and thus zombiefied---,
this dead, headless god turns everything to a deadly black slime which is fatal if touched. The
climax occurs when San and Ashitaka put the head back on the dead but walking (zombiefied)
headless Didarabocchi in order to save the whole forest and all the people in it. They must do this
before the sun rises or the action to replace the head will have no effect. (Thus the focus is on the
sun.) But they are in time:
Eboshi shoots the Ishibiya again.
The bullet hits the half-transformed Shishi Gami in its neck. The head
of Shishi Gami falls onto the ground.
1 http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/mh/synopsis/page2.html (accessed February 17,
2015)

The headless body of Shishi Gami turns into black tar-like slime and
explodes. Everything it touches dies. Great trees fall down, and dead
kodamas fall like snow.
Eboshi grabs Shishi Gami's head, and throws it to Jiko Bou, who puts
it in a container and runs off with his men.
Suddenly, Moro's head, detached from her body by the black ooze,
flies and bites off Eboshi's left arm. Moro's head dives straight into the
slime, and dies.
Ashitaka and Gonza run to Eboshi, and attend her wound. San
demands Ashitaka to give Eboshi to her so that she can tear this
woman apart. But Ashitaka says that Eboshi has been punished
enough.
The slime has now taken the shape of a headless Didarabocchi.
Searching for its head, it roams around. The forest keeps dying at its
touches.
Ashitaka asks San to help him to stop the catastrophe.
Shuddering in rage and grief, San cries:
"No!! You too are on the side of the humans! Take that woman and go
away!"

Ashitaka approaches her, with his arms open.
San: "Don't come near me!! I loathe humans!"
Ashitaka: "I am a human. And you... are a human, too."
San: "Shut up!! I'm a wolf!!!"
Blinded by rage, she stabs Ashitaka in chest with the stone knife he
gave her. But Ashitaka takes her into his arms, and holds her tightly.
Ashitaka: "I'm sorry. I tried
to stop them..."
In a numb voice, San
murmurs:
"It's all over. Shishi Gami is
dead."
But Ashitaka answers:
"No it isn't, since we are still here."
16. Tatara Ba
The siege has temporally ceased as the Samurais take a night rest.
Inside the hold of Tatara Ba, the survivors are also asleep, exhausted.
Toki is awake, and next to her is a leper woman, who is fixing Toki's
Ishibiya. They talk, laugh, and share food, as they await the dawn.
As the eastern sky begins to light up,
they hear a strange sound coming from
the direction of the forest. They see a
headless giant rising over the hill, and
Samurais running away for their lives
as it approaches Tatara Ba.
Ashitaka and San, riding the two wolves, run up to Tatara Ba.
Ashitaka shouts to them that they should evacuate to the lake, as water
seems to slow the slime down.

As the people leave Tatara Ba, Didarabocchi destroys it. Watching the
main building burn, Kouroku cries:
It's finished! We are through!"
Carrying a leper woman on her back, Toki scolds him:
"As long as we are alive, we'll manage!"
Ashitaka and San find Jiko Bou and his men, carrying the container
with the head in it. Ashitaka tells Jiko Bou to return the head to Shishi
Gami, but Jiko Bou will not listen to him, saying that it's human
nature to desire everything between heaven and earth. He says that
returning the head would have no effect since Didarabocchi will die
once it's exposed to the morning sun.
Ashitaka says that returning the head is the least that the humans
should do, and tries to persuade Jiko Bou. But Jiko Bou attacks
Ashitaka.
While Ashitaka and San are fighting against Jiko Bou and his men, the
black slime of Didarabocchi surrounds them. Jiko Bou finally gives up,
and opens the container.
Ashitaka and San hold Shishi Gami's head up. Golden liquid drips
down from the head, and leaves red-black marks all over the bodies of
Ashitaka and San. Ignoring the pain from the mark, Ashitaka shouts at
Didarabocchi:
"Shishi Gami! We shall return your head.
Please be calm!"
Didarabocchi stretches its neck towards
its head. As Didarabocchi bends over them, Ashitaka holds San tightly.
And Ashitaka and San are enveloped in golden light...

The body of Didarabocchi changes its color from dark gray to gold,
then its usual blue. Having regained its head, Didarabocchi slowly
stands up.
Then, the first light of morning strikes it.
Didarabocchi slowly falls down on the lake. It flashes with a bright
blue-white light, and disappears instantly.
As it disappears, a wind blows through. It blows out the fire at Tatara
Ba, and blows off everything, such as buildings, trees, horses, and
Samurais.
After the wind, plants start sprouting all over. The earth burned by
Didarabocchi is now covered entirely with green.2
It should be noted that “San” is (in Japanese) pronounced as the English word “sun”. San
(the name of Mononoke Hime) symbolizes the world of the sun economy, which has fled far
away from modern humans and our global petroleum mining/drilling economy, allegorized by
the mining of brown iron by the people of Tahara Ba. But just as the modern economy, based on
the idea of infinite growth, brings environmental disaster to Planet Earth: climate change, ocean
acidification, species extinction, islands of plastic debris in the oceans, the economy based on the
iron also goes too far (symbolized by Lady Eboshi’s endless ambitions) and nature, symbolized
by the Shishi Gami, starts to die. Miyazaki clearly hopes that through love, the love of people for
the old sun economy and a more natural way to live (symbolized by Ashitaka’s love for San), a
complete and totally destructive environmental disaster can be averted in time.
2 http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/mh/synopsis/page5.html (accessed February 17,
2015)

The green forest dying and then returning, after the head is put back, is the most visible way
to see the damage occurring and then being healed. Like Mononoke Hime, Macbeth plays out to
show humanity facing the tipping point---the inflection---where the economic costs can no
longer be borne.
In Mononoke Hime, we are told (but do not see it since it happened long ago) San was
thrown away by her fleeing parents and raised by wolves; the sun economy is not valued and is
just thrown away and sacrificed as people ‘save’ themselves. In Macbeth, it’s not so different:
humankind moves away from the sun economy at the start of the play, when Macbeth kills
Duncan. In the play, the basic cause is called “ambition” (allegorizing people striving; in a sense,
saving themselves), when Macbeth describes his motivation for killing Duncan as his own
“vaulting ambition” (I.vii.27).
The Old Order =Duncan the King = the Sun
The king, Duncan, functions on one level as a symbol of the sun, which is not merely a heavenly
body, but an idea of a sun-man relationship. Duncan says to Macbeth, “Welcome hither! I have begun to
plant thee, and will labor to make thee full of growing” (I.iv.28-29). In this old sun-based order, things are
largely agricultural.
Duncan’s murder is analogous to man’s stepping away from the sun economy, and this is most clear
right after the death of the king: “Here lay Duncan/His silver skin lac’d with his golden blood/ And his

gash’d stabs looked like a breach in nature” (II.iii.111-113). The golden and silver colors of his body give
him a supernatural and cosmic aspect---like the stars, moon, sun, and other celestial bodies, rather than a
bleeding human one; the “breach in nature” is the paradigmatic path away from the solar economy. This
vision also seems strangely similar to the Shishi Gami after it has been beheaded: changing color and
shape in a bizarre and shocking way and bringing calamity in the form of a dangerous fatal slime.
Later, Lady Macbeth describes Duncan’s crown as “the golden round” (I.v.28), words that flash an
image of the sun. Another earlier conversation illuminates this Duncan-Sun equivalence particularly
resonantly and indeed almost playfully:
Macbeth: My dearest love, Duncan comes here to-night.
Lady Macbeth: And when goes hence?
Macbeth: Tomorrow, as he purposes.
Lady Macbeth: “Oh, never shall sun that morrow see!”
(I.v.59-61)
“Ravin up thine own live’s means!”& coal
Just as when the Shishi Gami is beheaded and changes color and causes terrors of destruction as the
slime from his body kills all the green forest, the death of Duncan, associated with “a breach in nature”, is
repeatedly associated with major cosmic, religious, and natural calamities. “The night has been

unruly….Some say the earth was feverous and did shake” (II.iii.54,80) reports Lennox just before
Duncan’s corpse is found. Duncan’s death is “Most sacrilegious murther” (II.iii.67), while Duncan’s dead
body is compared to “the great doom’s image” (II.iii.78). It is all very dramatic and impressive. Yet
hiding in all of the dramatic rhetoric and brilliant metaphors with the occasional classical allusion (“a new
Gorgon” (II.iii.72)) is a passage that Hermetically points a finger directly at the true villain, coal:
The night has been unruly. Where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down, and (as they say)
Lamentings heard i’ the air; strange screams of death,
And prophesying, with accents terrible,
Of dire combustion and confus’d events. The obscure bird
Clamor’d the livelong night. Some say the earth was feverous,
and did shake. (II.iii.54-61)
The word “chimneys” in the passage above is one of the Hermetic message couriers. Chimneys and
new developments in chimney construction became more and more common throughout the second half
of the 16th century as coal use rapidly grew. In The Big Smoke: A Brief History of Air Pollution in
London since Medieval Times. Peter Brimblecombe notes that:
The domestic acceptance of the fossil fuel (coal) is also reflected
in the increase in the number of chimneys in the city. William

Harrison (b.1634-d.1593), one of the contributors to Holinshed’s
Chronicles, which Shakespeare drew upon so heavily for his
plays, wrote as a marginal note that the number of chimneys had
increased greatly since his youth (mid-sixteenth century). In
those times, he wrote, (wood) smoke indoors had been regarded
as hardening the timbers of the house and as a disinfectant to
ward off disease. (Brimblecombe, 35)
The word “chimney” then would be rather naturally associated with “coal” in the minds of the
audience. Next is, of course, “combustion”, recalling the way that coal burns, and which looks mystical
when it is paired with the word “dire” in the passage. But I think that “dire” is simply a way for
Shakespeare to privately cast judgment on the new economy of coal. “Blown”, “air” and “obscure” in
the passage also Hermetically signal coal smoke as it blew around in the air and obscured the sky.
In the middle of the very next scene, about 90 lines after this quite Hermetic passage, Macduff tells
Ross that “Malcolm and Donalbain, the king’s two sons/Are stolen away and fled, which puts upon
them/ Suspicion of the deed” .(II.iv.25-7) Ross then comments disapprovingly on the two sons’ action in
a most curious way:
Ross: ‘Gainst nature still.
Thriftless ambition, that will ravin up

Thine own live’s means. Then ‘tis most like
The sovereignity will fall upon Macbeth (II.iv.27-30)
Since we know that Macbeth is an Everyman figure, forced to choose coal, then the judgment is
another Hermetic commentary on the way that the coal economy (and fossil fuel economies in general)
produce effects that make it hard to access the sun economy in the future (“ravin up thine own lives’
means”.
The deadly slime covering the whole landscape in Mononoke Hime also symbolizes this same
danger: the sun economy (covered with cement, for example) ceases to function at all. At the same time,
the brown iron/fossil fuel economy is not functioning either, leaving people exposed.
The increasing pollution and loss of connections to the natural world, connections Shakespeare and
other Londoners of his age (that is, people from the countryside who had known a largely pre-coal
economy) had taken for granted, made for a sense of ineffable communal sadness, or melancholy, while
coal also caused physical illnesses such as lung ailments and throat problems. Lady Macbeth, who at the
beginning of the play is so strong and confident, calling for “thick night”, smoke, gall, and for spirits to
“make thick” her blood and so forth, at the end of the play becomes a weak and debilitated patient,
afflicted with “thick-coming fancies”. She used to love, it seems, that word “thick”, but now in her
illness it has taken revenge on her, or rather, its use in the name of her illness is meant, no doubt, to
recall the ‘thick smoke’ of London which caused real illness in the citizens there.

In his work in a public arena such as the theater, Shakespeare strove to participate usefully in “a
communal form of experience” that was also “a process of consciousness shared by the audience”
(Weimann 215). Macbeth could have helped to explain, identify, and artistically locate some of the forces
(natural, social, historical) that functioned, through human actions, to define and shape the London of the
time, including the use of coal and the consequences of burning it.
Mononoke Hime also participates in the same communal aims and strategies by allegorizing the
problems of the modern economy in a safe way. Its use of scenes of deep nature and trees, clean skies,
clean rivers unpolluted by plastic bags, places with no internal combustion engines, and so forth, help to
give audiences a small 2-hour escape from the modern landscape and its endless cement and asphalt.
Tainter, Complexity, and “a child, crowned, with a tree in his
hand”
As Macbeth seeks the prophecies of the witches for the last time, and the third apparition, a “child,
crowned, with a tree in his hand” enters, Macbeth describes him using language that Hermetically
indicates the sun: “What is this/That rises like the issue of a king/And wears upon his baby-brow the
round/And top of sovereignty?” (IV.i.87-89) (my emphasis) (The sun was regarded as above the king in
the Great Chain of Being). This is the moment when we can see already through imagery that the power
of the sun will be resurgent and reborn. (Macbeth hints at his own unconscious recognition of this since
he speaks these lines that prefigure his doom: something that will also top his sovereignty will emerge).

Thus this apparition is the one that holds the tree in his hand and says: “Macbeth shall never vanquish’d
be until/ Great Birnan wood to high Dunsinane hill/ Shall come against him” (IV.1.92-94) Macbeth then
asks, rhetorically, “Who can impress the forest?” (IV.195), seemingly unaware that it is the sun and
nature that give rise to the trees and forests and ultimately decide where they will grow. However, it is
precisely because Macbeth is a collective Everyman that he cannot process the message that signals his
end.
Shakespeare guesses that coal will someday be depleted and distills this difficult transition back to a
sun-based economy to an ingenious image, a child carrying a tree, as a solar-powered world moves back
into human view and calculations.
Macbeth’s denial and desperation toward the end of the play, (“Liar and slave!” (V.4.34) he shouts
at a messenger bearing bad news; “Hang those that talk of fear” (V.iii.36), he orders) symbolize the
strategy complex civilizations adopt as they come up against critical natural limits: they attempt, with
more and more difficulty, to maintain the status quo. In his book The Collapse of Complex Societies,
Joseph Tainter describes this process:
Sociopolitical organizations constantly encounter problems
that require increased investment merely to preserve the status
quo. This investment comes in such forms as increasing size of
bureaucracies, cumulative organizational solutions, increasing

costs of legitimizing activities, and increasing costs of internal
control and external defense. All of these must be borne by
levying greater costs on the support population, often to no
increased advantage. As the number and costliness of
organizational investments increases, the proportion of a society’s
budget available for investment in future economic growth must
decline.
Thus while initial investment by a society in growing
complexity may be a rational solution to perceived needs, that
happy state of affairs cannot last. As the least costly extractive,
economic, information-processing, and organizational solutions
are progressively exhausted, any further need for increased
complexity must be met by more costly responses. As the cost of
organizational solutions grows, the point is reached at which
continued investment in complexity does not give a proportionate
yield, and the marginal return begins to decline. The added
benefits per unit of investment start to drop.
A society that has reached this point cannot simply rest on its

accomplishments, that is, attempt to maintain its marginal return
at the status quo, without further deterioration……(eventually)
declining marginal returns make complexity an overall less
attractive strategy, so that parts of a society perceive increasing
advantage to a policy of separation or disintegration….At some
point along the declining portion of a marginal return curve, a
society reaches a state where the benefits available for a level of
investment are no higher than those available for some lower
level. Complexity at such a point is decidedly disadvantageous,
and the society is in serious danger of collapse from
decomposition or external threat. (Tainter 195-6)
The “child” apparition may have been chosen as an image by Shakespeare because a youth, with a
simpler understanding of the world than an adult possesses, represents the lower level of complexity that
society would have to return to in the collapse process, no matter how protracted.
But Macbeth’s death is not the final word. His head is carried onstage, signaling the death of the old
fossil fuel economic paradigm. On the other hand, the Shishi Gami’s severed head is restored to the
Shishi Gami’s (or rather the Didarabocchi’s zombiefied) body, signaling the reparation and restoration of
the green nature that the Shishi Gami represents. The severed heads, in both, represent the principles or

ideas that govern human thinking. The Shishi Gami and Macbeth, however, are polar opposites since one
represents sun-governed nature and one represents fossil fuel-governed human society.
The tree branches that the soldiers use to disguise themselves as they advance on Macbeth before he
is vanquished are the harbingers of a new ‘green’ time (a world without fossil fuels/Macbeth) and the
animated image of a spreading green forest is, fascinatingly, also seen in Mononoke Hime, in this case,
after the Shishi Gami’s head is restored by Ashitaka and San. As Ashitaka and San restore the head, they
embrace in a golden light, united in a sort of symbolic hieros gamos, a sacred spiritual and sexual union.
It is only after the Shishi Gami’s head is restored that the slime can be rendered harmless and green forest
return.
In Macbeth, the new king, Malcolm, ends the play with a speech which contains these lines:
…My thanes and kinsmen,
Henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland
In such an honor nam’d. What’s more to do,
Which would be planted newly with the time,
As calling home our exiled friends abroad….(V.ix.28-32) (my
emphasis)
In his choice of agricultural language, Malcolm, the new king sounds very much like the one
Macbeth did away with (Duncan: “I have begun to plant thee and will make thee full of growing”

(I.v.28-9)). Shakespeare therefore sees the new post-Macbeth (post-fossil fuel) order as another sun-based
one: “our exiled friends”, the sun-based economy, will return with this energy transition.
In this rather economic view of Shakespeare, I believe I can find some general support in Michael
Bristol’s Big-Time Shakespeare, where the author sees the extended “social dialogue” with Shakespeare
as a way to keep alive and preserve certain “values more durable than those which circulate in current
markets”:
Shakespeare is a common possession, though not ambiguously a
common good. In my view, Shakespeare’s authority is linked to the
capacity of his works to represent the complexity of social time and
value in the successor cultures of early modern England. One of the
crucial features common to these successor cultures is the way
individuals and institutions must constantly adapt to the exigencies
of a market economy. Our extended dialogue with Shakespeare’s
works has been one of the important ways to articulate values more
durable than those which circulate in current markets. (Bristol, xii)
The market economy (now also known the ‘global economy’) came about through the fossil fuels
that cannot, by definition, be as “durable” as the sun, and there lies the source of an economic
discontinuity, the crux of the issue. Macbeth’s rise and fall symbolizes the trajectory of human fossil fuel

use, from zero to a peak and then back to zero (with the death of Macbeth). It is a thermodynamic
phenomenon based fundamentally on material exigencies, a single wave of energy pulsing through the
system. Miyazaki may also be using his art to circulate these “values which are more durable than those
which circulate in current markets”. In fact, it is certain that this is what he is doing.
“Art hopes to sidestep mortality with feats of attention, of harmony, of illuminating connection,
while enjoying, it might be said, at best a slower kind of mortality: paper yellows, language becomes old
fashioned, revelatory human news passes into general social wisdom”, wrote another great writer, John
Updike (Updike, xiv). I think that Shakespeare hoped that his faith in the primal constancy and the steady
usefulness of the sun would be guided by his art into “general social wisdom” one day in a constructive,
peaceful and positive way. Macbeth, with its brightening end and its focus on healing and medicines, is
another expression of his hopes, just as Mononoke Hime is a similar expression of Miyazaki Hayao’s very
similar hopes.
Works Cited:
Brimblecombe, Peter. The Big Smoke: A history of air pollution in London since medieval times.
London: Methuen. 1987.
Bristol, Michael D. Big-time Shakespeare. Oxon, Oxford: Routledge. 1996.
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas. The Entropy Law and the Economic Process. 1971. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. trans. Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
1994.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet in The Riverside Shakespeare. Eds. Levin,
Blakemore et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974.
Schneider, Erid D. and Dorion Sagan. Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005.
Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge U. Press,
1988.
Weimann, Robert. Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins U. Press, 1978.
Updike, John. The Early Stories (1953-1975). New York, NY: Alfred Knopf, 2003.

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