Author: John D. (Page 171 of 202)

If one can presume that ancient Japanese had close links with Korean shamanism, and that Korean shamanism derived from that of Mongolian/Siberia through southern migration, then it would be surprising if there were not close affinities between Shinto and Mongolian shamanism. Below are just a few of the similarities. The list could be easily extended, but I think it suffices to show how closely Shinto is bound to East Asian shamanism.

The cave at Takachiho into which Amaterasu supposedly withdrew

Worldview
Mongolian shamanism, indeed shamanism in general, is animistic, polytheistic, and aims at living in a state of harmony or balance with the world. There are countless deities and spirits, including ancestral, spirits of place, and beings that live in the upper world (tenger in mongolian is cognate with tenjin in Japanese). There’s no fixed doctrine and no holy books. Ancestor worship blends into nature spirits. In Mongolia ancient legend tells of the sun goddess Naran Goohon becoming sick and making the world dim but being restored after a meeting of the gods.  In Shinto Amaterasu retreats into a cave, making the world dim, but light is restored after a meeting of the gods.

3 worlds
In Mongolian shamanism there is an upper world, this world and a lower world where the dead go. The
lower world is dimmer than ours and can be entered through caves and tunnels etc. Human souls awaiting reincarnation can be found there, and it operates with only half a sun and half a moon. The upper world is brighter than ours and is where the chief deities reside.  In Shinto mythology there is an upper world called Takamagahara (High Plain of Heaven) where the chief deities reside, as well as earth and an underworld (Yomi) where the dead reside.

Izanagi and Izanami on the floating bridge of heaven

Bridge to heaven
In Mongolian mythology a rainbow connects the upper world and this world.  In Shinto mythology the two worlds are joined by Ama no ukihashi, the floating bridge of heaven, commonly thought of as clouds or a rainbow.

Dreams
In both Shinto and Mongolian shamanism dreams are messages sent by the spirits. They often disclose sacred sites or events of special significance. The location for many Shinto shrines and the identity of kami were ‘revealed’ in this way.

Mongolian ritual 'minaa' used to whip away impurities (courtesy of 3worlds website)

Pollution and Purification
Both Mongolian shamanism and Shinto believe that spirits are offended by disrespect, lack of hygiene, the violation of taboos, or contact with blood and death. Merit accumulates through an upright life, religious acts and sacrifices. Before rituals, purification is carried out with such means as smoke, salt, fasting and washing.  A ‘spiritual cleaner’ is used to sweep away impurities (minaa in Mongolian, haraigushi in Japanese).  The minaa can be used like a whip to clear negative energy, and is also applied to the body as a means of healing.

Sacred tree with shimenawa at Omiwa Jinja

Sacred trees
Trees are seen as a manifestation of the earth’s power, and remarkable trees represent a special mark of the lifeforce. Ribbons or silk scarves are tied to their branches in Mongolia; in Japan sacred trees are marked with a shimenawa rice rope.

Ancestral spirits
In both Mongolian and Shinto traditions, human spirits are thought to remain behind after death as protector and helper of the household. After several generations they no longer remain as individual entities but merge into an anonymous whole.  Those who exhibit exceptional power, such as Chingis Khan and Tokugawa Ieyasu, are worshipped as deities regardless of anything to do with morality

Angry spirits
In both Mongolian and Shinto traditions, people who die too young or unjustly may plague descendants and need placating.  Also those who are too strongly attached to things in this world may linger on unrequited.

Animal familiars
In Mongolia animal spirits are used by shamans as aides in their otherworldly journeys. Totem animals play a symbolic role as ancestors of various clans, and deities may be associated with a particular animal.  In Shinto animal spirits once also served as figureheads for clans and deities.  Deer for the Fujiwara clan; crow for the Kamo clan; fox for Inari; dove for Hachiman, etc.

Spirit bodies
In both Mongolian shamanism and Shinto, objects made of material such as wood and rock, or simply a doll or a paper drawing, are used as a ‘spirit body’. The spirit is drawn into the object in a special rite conducted by the shaman/priest.

Shinto drum on display during a ritual at Yoshida Jinja

Drums, bells and rattles
In shamanism the rhythmic repetition of the drum, quickening in tempo, leads to an altered state of consciousness.  In Shinto the drum is a treasured item.  In Mongolia bells and rattles are thought to attract the attention of the spirits.  In Shinto a bell is rung at the shrine to attract the kami, and miko use a kind of rattle (suzu) when dancing in order to catch the kami’s attention.

Divination
In Mongolian shamanism, as well as ancient Japan, the shoulder blade of a sheep or deer was burnt in order to interpret the burns and cracks.  Divination remains an important part of Shinto and shamanism.

Communion
At the end of rituals in both Mongolia and Shinto, participants partake in food or beverage as a means of communing with fellow humans and with the spirits.

Mirrors
Mirrors play a very special part in shamanism. Ancient mirrors are thought to possess a spirit, and they act as important sources and absorbers of energy.  Shamans wear round mirror discs on their robes.  In Shinto the mirror was elevated into a central focus of worship, as representative of the spirit of Amaterasu.

Shaman costume (courtesy of the Danish National Museum)

Manchurian shaman's costume

The pictures here come from a site called Mongolian Shaman, which has this to say on the subject of the shaman’s mirror. “The heavy shaman’s mirrors act in a double capacity – they protect the shaman by deflecting harm, while revealing what is normally invisible to the human eye. The number of mirrors on the costume indicates the shaman’s powers and maps a geographical cosmos. By wearing the costume, the shaman is located in the centre of this cosmos. During performance, a shaman is seized by one or more ancestral spirits, so that what is inside the mirror-costume is the spirits, rather than the shaman’s body. Here, the body is something open to forces that can control it, inhabit its form and shape its physical features.”

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Information draws on two books by Mongolian shaman Sarangerel – Riding Windhorses (2000) and Chosen by the Spirits (2001). The author was born in the US of Mongolian stock, and went to Siberia for training then worked closely with the shaman centre in Ulan Bator. Sadly she died in 2006, aged just 43.

Navaho shaman

In Navaho cosmology all beings have a natural place, and when they are in balance the universe is a place of beauty. However, aspects of the universe have a tendency to fall into disharmony, and ceremonies need to be held to restore the natural balance. Any form of disturbance has to be controlled in this way, particularly those caused by the dead (angry ghosts). Even good people can become vindictive after death and need to be dealt with.

Shinto too has traditionally been much concerned with the pacification of hungry spirits, and the Tenmangu cult is one such famous instance when it was believed that the angry spirit of Sugiwara no Michizane (845-903) needed to be placated by deification and worship. The Japanese preoccupation with spirits is seen above all in Noh and in the annual Obon return of the dead. Indeed, a belief in ancestral spirits may be the most fundamental Japanese mindset. (See here.)

For the Navaho, contact with certain animals is considered a source of impurity and disharmony, and there are many taboos about them. In Shinto it is rather contact with blood and death. In both cases the potential contagion seemed to ancient cultures as threatening to the life force.

As animists, both the Navaho and Shinto imagine the universe to be teeming with spirits. As well as those of natural phenomena, there are the ancestral spirits and cultural gods. For the Navaho the greatest of the latter is the Changing Woman, who has two children by the Sun – Monster Slayer and Born for Water. This is echoed in Shinto mythology by the primacy of the shamaness-weaver Amaterasu and her brother, the monster-slaying Susanoo associated with the sea.

Masked drama, Shinto style

There are other spirits in the Navaho cosmology, known as yei. As with the kami, the yei are not necessarily benevolent to humans and have to be placated in order to maintain harmony. In Navaho ceremonies they are sometimes portrayed by masked dancers, reminiscent of the kagura masked dance-drama of Shinto.

Navaho culture is full of taboos, to do with rules of social contact, sexual activity, treatment of the dead, sacred objects, being untidy or dirty, etc etc. Breaking a taboo is not a sin as such, but a cause of disharmony necessitating a ceremony to restore balance. Correct performance of rituals is absolutely crucial in terms of effectiveness, a trait which characterises Shinto too. Any mistake may cause the spirits to be offended and harmony will not prevail. Perhaps here lies the famed Japanese aversion to making mistakes!

A major component of Navaho ceremony consists of requests for blessing. These ‘blessingways’ are individual rather than communal, and may be to do with childbirth, marriage, a new home, the protection of livestock or a departing soldier, etc. Shinto too offers individual rites of this type. But the spiritual healing ceremonies that are prevalent among the Navaho are absent from modern Shinto, presumably because in the transition from shaman to priest the practice was lost. Something of the old ways remains in Shugendo, however, and practitioners of mountain asceticism still carry out spiritual healing to this day.

Shugendo practitioner applying some spiritual healing

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Information draws on Sacred Hoop Issue 73, article by Nicholas Breeze Wood, as well as Shamanism, An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices and Culture by Marko Namba Walter et al

For the Toltecs energy is called teotl and is seen as divine.  It’s been translated as God, though it’s more akin to ‘kami’ in Japanese…   It’s just one of the common points between Shinto and the shamanism of the native Mexican people.  “It is worth noting,” writes Victor Sanchez in Toltecas del Nuevo Milenio, “that to both the Totecs of ancient times and to the surviving peoples of today, religion was not a set of predetermined patterns of behavior, dogmas or the projection of self-importance, but a series of practices that were aimed to keep man in touch with Spirit.’  Maintaining harmony is key.

Himiko as played by Sayuri Yoshinaga in 'Maboroshi no Yamataikoku'

The main Toltec practice is shamanic journeying, in which the shaman enters into a trance through the help of the drum and natural substances.  In proto-Shinto too there were female shamans who travelled into the spirit world to make contact with transcendental powers.  The most famous of the early shamans was Queen Himiko (c.175-248).  Another was that of Usa Hachiman, where a female oracle worked with a male medium of communication.

The female shamans were driven out of the mainstream as male ritualists came to dominance following the appropriation of kami worship by a centralising state after the time of Emperor Tenmu (c.631-686).  Instead of travelling into the spirit world, the ritualists invited the spirits down, made offerings and conducted ceremonies to placate them.  Kami oroshi (descent of the kami) and kami okuri (sending off the kami) still form an important of rituals.  Instead of a vehicle for shamanic flight, the drum became a symbolic marker of the beginning and end of ceremonies.

Purification and healing are important aspects of shamanic cultures, and for the Toltecs this is done with a branch to which feathers are attached.  It is used in healing ceremonies to cleanse a person’s aura.  In Shinto a sakaki branch with white strips of paper attached is used in similar manner as a means of purification.

As with other primal religions, human beings are presumed to have an innate sense of virtue.  ‘We only need to look at the inner universe that every human being has within them, and there is a master, a true guide, and the true knowledge that comes from contact with the infinite,’ says the Toltec shaman, Wirikuta Maza Mau.  Shinto treasures sincerity and purity for similar reasons.  “The important thing is to live in the moment, being one with all that is,’ stresses Wirikuta.  In Shinto this equates to the concept of nakaima (literally, the middle of now i.e. the present moment).

Japan and Mexico are not usually thought of a sharing much in common, but here in the ancient practices can be found two ends of the same circle.

Toltec shaman dancer, with macaw feathers

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Information and quotations are taken from Sacred Hoop magazine, Issue 73, and Shamanism, An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture by Mariko Namba Walter et al.

Shinto as we know it today is an imperial construct pieced together after 1868 by a ruling clique of Restorationists who promoted a state ideology based around the divinity of the emperor.  As such it was conceived as a counterpart to Christianity in the West.  Moreover, it differentiated the new regime from the Buddhism and Confucianism that for over 250 years helped prop up the Tokugawa dynasty.

Siberian shaman drumming up the spirits

Traditionalists claim the roots of Shinto lie in Japan’s ancient past. But in A New History of Shinto, Breen and Teeuwen demonstrate that rather than being indigenous, it is by and large an imported and invented religion. This accords with the so-called ‘onion theory’ popular in Shinto studies, whereby if you strip away all the foreign accretions there is nothing left at the core.

My own understanding is a little bit different and based on Gunther Nitschke’s statement in From Ando to Shinto that the rituals and accoutrements constitute a ‘fossilised shamanism’. You find evidence of this throughout Shinto, from early miko mediums to the use of the drum, animal familiars, mythological ‘three worlds’ and symbolic reference to the axis mondi.  As such I believe Shinto to belong to a group of East Asian religions which derive from Siberian shamanism.

According to theorists, it was in Siberia that shamanism was born (the word itself derives from the Tungusic language). Others see it mankind’s basic mindset and that in Paleolithic times it was well-nigh universal.  Later the ethical religions of the Axial Age incorporated or suppressed shamanism, making Shinto unusual in managing to continue into the modern age with forms that are primal in essence.

It was this aspect that got Joseph Campbell excited. ‘Culturally the blend from these [Ainu beliefs] to the more primitive aspects of Japanese Shinto is very smooth,’ he claimed in The Masks of God.  ‘The source land of both peoples was Northeast and North-Central Asia – a zone from which numerous entries into North America were also launched.  And since continuous contributions from the same North Asiatic circumpolar shphere likewise flowed into Northern Europe, astonishing affinities turn up throughout the native lore of Japan, touching fields of myth as widely separated as Ireland, Kamchatka, and the Canadian Northeast.’

Korean shaman ceremony

Given that the native peoples of South and North America moved out of the Central Asian heartland (they share the Mongol birthmark), one can suppose that they took their religion with them.  And sure enough one finds similarities with Shinto, above all in the primary purpose of the practices – maintaining harmony.  Angry spirits, pestilence, and natural disasters etc. are seen as disrupting harmony, and rituals are employed to restore the natural balance between mankind and the spirit world.

With the passage of time differences in practice invariably arose in the various locales, and superficially the customs no longer resemble each other.  Geography, culture, and individual initiatives all helped to shape native religions in different ways. But I think one can see the same concerns at their core, and in the coming weeks I’d like to explore the commonalities in a series of cultural comparisons, beginning first of all with the Toltecs of Mexico.

Great Bear Spirit, common to both Buryat and Ainu cultures