In many ways Japanese who choose to follow Witchcraft are the mirror opposite of Westerners who choose to practise Shinto. Both look to distant countries with alien customs for … Read the rest
Category: Paganism (Page 1 of 9)
The Solitary Witch
John Dougill meets a Wiccan – who’s Japanese
The growth of Wicca in recent years has been striking and it is now the UK’s seventh biggest religion. The revival was sparked by Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954) … Read the rest
The extracts below are taken from a paper written by a postdoctoral researcher at Kyoto University, Eriko Kawanishi. She has an interest in Western paganism, particularly British Wicca and Celtic forms or paganism, and has made what she calls a
What happens if you apply Zen to the Celtic tradition of Druidry? It’s not something that would usually come to mind, though a book with that theme has just been published with neo-pagan specialists, John Hunt Publishing.
Druidry is a … Read the rest
The trailblazing Megan Manson has written of the similarity of fairies and kami on her Shinto Pagan website. She writes excellent book reviews, and one of her top recommendations of books in 2016 was on Fairycraft. ‘It is … Read the rest
Recently publications about yōkai are prevalent, but what are they exactly? The answer seems to be rather vague. Here’s Wikipedia’s answer: “a class of supernatural monsters, spirits and demons in Japanese folklore. The word yōkai is made up … Read the rest
This is part of a series on Lafcadio Hearn, a Shinto sympathiser 100 years ahead of his time. Though he was not as proficient in language terms as his great Shinto contemporaries, such as B.H. Chamberlain and W.G. Aston, he … Read the rest