Jurojin

The cheerful god of health and longevity

Jurojin is one of the deities (fukunokami) of the Seven Lucky Gods of Japan (Shichifukujin); the other six being:

Jurojin

Jurojin

Jurojin is a Taoist god from China, identified as the personification of the Southern Polar Star. He is the god of wealth, wisdom and happiness for our long lives. (Read a bit more about the Southern Polar Star on the page about Fukurokuju.

Jurojin's appearance is similar to Fukurokuju's: a smiling old man dressed as a Chinese sage, long white beard and an elongated bald head. Unlike the other fukunokami, he's often seen without a scholar's cap, which might be because his arms cannot reach so high.

He is also thought to inhabit the same body as Fukurokuju, which can cause confusion and misidentification.

As with Fukurokuju, Jurojin has a staff with a scroll (makimono) attached, which contains a life study of the world and the secret of longevity.

He is sometimes flanked by a stag or deer (shika) as his messenger, a tortoise (kame) or a crane (tsuru), all of which symbolize longevity.

Most notable is the extremely high forehead. A high brow is a popular notion of academicians and intellectuals, and supported by the pseudoscience of phrenology. Slightly derogatory terms include "egghead" and "boffin", meaning those too deeply intellectual to be bothered with normal everyday life and lacking common sense.

Where the West has had the now-debunked phrenology, Chinese culture has had physiognomy and Feng Shui to imagine the appearance of out-of-this-world gods.

Jurojin's forehead goes way above being highbrow. Sci-fi comics show aliens with high foreheads because, well, that's because sci-fi authors imagine how such beings look if they have exceptionally high intelligence and not from this world.

Jurojin
Jurojin
Confucius
Confucius
Einstein
Einstein
alien
Bob