7 Signs You May Carry Nine-tailed Fox Medicine

“What the lion cannot manage to do, the fox can.” ~German Proverb

Nine-Tailed Fox Medicine draws from East Asian shamanic and spiritual traditions, where the fox spirit (huli jing in Chinese, kitsune in Japanese, kumiho in Korean) symbolizes profound transformation, rebirth, and dual energies of light and shadow.

This “medicine” represents the power accumulated over a lifetime (or lifetimes)—each tail signifying a cycle of death and resurrection—empowering the individual with cunning wisdom, adaptability, and spiritual vitality. It's the energy of the survivor who outfoxes chaos and weaves through illusion while using deep insight to navigate realms unseen. Let’s break it down…

1.) You possess a charismatic allure:

“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.” ~Novalis

You are a mythmaker, a dream-weaver, a showstopper. You are a burning flame. Your nine tails are a consummate fire for an otherwise beaconless world. They represent sharpened mettle, fierce rebirth, pressurized pain, coupstick courage, death-stropped life, ego annihilation, dogma humiliation, Dionysian antifragility, and Promethean audacity. And not necessarily in that order.

But, nine-tail wielder beware, such a fire is also a beacon for moths and those who do not know how to be Fire. So be prepared to burn away their dross. Be prepared to turn their precious structures into ashes. Be prepared to melt their golden idols into molten puddles of “try again.” And most of all, be prepared for their ire. For they will cling to it all even as the ashes slip through their fingers.

Let the hesitant balk. You are fire. Your wisdom burns. So be it.

2.) You cultivate a cutting insight:

“It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand.” ~Søren Kierkegaard

The growth of your nine tails has taught you the crucial difference between written and unwritten laws. You see how people devote themselves to the written and forsake the unwritten at the detriment of the world. But between the two, and despite the masses, you thrive.

You’ve developed a penchant for impermanence, an instinct for transience, and a phenomenology for ephemerality. You skip through hell. You flip the bird in heaven. You outwit the devil and bluff God.

You see how human understanding is a bulwark, a stopgap, a strawman. And so you crash through the ramparts, you unstop the contrivance, you scare the scarecrow. You do so to highlight the unwritten law and mock the written. Such insight cuts like a sword through flimsy parochialism.

3.) You are cunningly adaptable:

“Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.” ~Saint Francis de Sales

Each of your nine tails signifies a transformation, an annihilation, a coming apart and coming back together again. Your heart has been shattered on the unforgiving ground of the abyss so many times that it has become one with Akhilandeshvari (the Never Not Broken Goddess). It has been pieced back together again so many times on the summit that it resides in the chest of the Phoenix.

Your malleability is your genius, your locus, your compass. It points in all directions, and none. And so, you’re able to reorient your orientation. You diverge from the social milieux. You outfox the orthodox. You are always one step ahead of the curve, playing Chess while everyone else is playing Checkers, playing the Infinite Game while everyone else is caught up in the drama of petty finite games.

You realize that the real secret to becoming adaptable to paradox and maintaining the tension between opposites is keeping humility ahead of hubris, humor ahead of power, and the Truth Quest ahead of any given “truth.” You leave room for rebirth.

4.) You’ve gone through multiple cycles of rebirth:

“Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.” ~Wendell Berry

You have endured multiple “Dark Nights of the Soul,” emerging stronger each time, growing new tails—transforming hardship into profound personal evolution and resilience.

Each tail represents a stage of Ego Death. The growth of each new “tail” signifies the death of an old god. Finitude had to be sacrificed to infinity to truly embrace the interconnectedness of all things. Sometimes you had to trick yourself into evolution. You had to become a spark in the dark, and sometimes even a blot of darkness in the blinding light.

You had to ask yourself belief-wrecking questions. You had to interrogate your soul. You had to force your head over the abyss. You had to trick your shadow into guiding you into your own Hero’s Journey. Your each tail represents the profound realization that you are God playing peek a boo with itself. You are the world at play.

5.) You are a creative shapeshifter:

“I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion.” ~Napoleon Bonaparte

Other than the butterfly, no other creature symbolizes shapeshifting better than the nine-tailed fox. With the ability to shapeshift into anything, there is no reason to assume it cannot shapeshift into a caterpillar, cocoon, or butterfly.

Embodying nine-tail fox energy, you are daring enough to don wolf-masks, whale-masks, crow-masks, even god-masks. Indeed. You carry the medicine to subsume God itself. Infinity is inside you, burning robustly through the effigies of your nine tails.

Ultimately, you realize that everything in life is Metaphor. From shapeshifting comes worldmaking. Life becomes art, and art becomes life. Forget genes. Forget memes. You carry mythemes and astonish the world.

As Ruth Brown said, “A fox is a wolf who sends flowers.”

6.) You embody a playful duality:

“Irony and humor belong to the sphere of infinite resignation; their flexibility is due to the fact that the individual is incommensurable with actuality.” ~Kierkegaard

You balance light and shadow, finitude and infinity, life and death with mischievous joy. Wise yet whimsical, benevolent yet bold, you honor the fox's trickster essence that outfoxes even fate itself.

You exist between realms—human, spirit, and divine—never fully bound by the material world’s rules. You use irony and humor to navigate life’s absurdities, accepting their incommensurability with societal norms while wielding wit to transcend limitations. Your legendary cunning is a sharp, detached perspective that sees through illusions. You employ irony not as cynicism but as a tool to outmaneuver rigid realities.

You are a being of paradox, neither fully of this world nor entirely separate from it. Your incommensurability with actuality manifests in your ability to straddle human and other worldly realms. You use irony and humor to reconcile your inner complexity with a world that often misunderstands your enigmatic and mythological depth.

7.) You harbor visionary wisdom:

“Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect; they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.” ~Jose Ortega y Gasset

You seek out rabbit holes, but so as not to get pigeonholed (stuck), you ascend through wormholes. Your fox spirit elevates you above one-dimensionality. Multidimensionally, you soar.

Your ascension is best summed up by the concept of ‘going Meta’. You can reimagining imagination. You see the big picture. Through your third-eye illumination and visionary insight, you can connect dots that most people aren’t even aware of.

By going Meta, you transcend ego and embrace soul. You’re launched into a big-picture perspective, shot out of the box of outdated thinking and into a realm of higher consciousness where your outdated lizard brain is countered by updated logic, reasoning, and imagination.

You’ve gained the sacred vision of “Over Eyes” (similar to the Astronaut Overview Effect), where limited societal delusions and cultural conditioning give way to empowered interconnectedness and sacred interdependence.

Outfoxing fixedness, you’ve made a sacred space for the numinous.

Image source:

Fox Spirit Full Moon by Whimmy

About the Author:

Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.

This article (7 Signs You May Carry Nine-tailed Fox Medicine) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.