Shinto

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post asking who had the authority to decide whether someone could practise Shinto, or was practising it wrongly, and came to the conclusion that no one did. However, as I mentioned at the end of that post, there might still be things that you should do if you are investigating Shinto, even if no-one has the authority to tell you that you are doing it wrong. This post is about my position on that.

Obviously, this post is not telling you what you have to do if you want to investigate or practise Shinto. I spent a whole post arguing that no-one has the authority to do that, and that includes me. Rather, I will describe what I think is a good way to approach the field, with reasons. It is up to you to decide whether you agree.

I thought I’d do a very simple post with some photographs I took recently (over the last couple of weeks) of jinja and other Shinto things near my home.

When should you take offerings down from your kamidana?

A few weeks ago, someone left a comment on the blogpost on my old website about kamidana, suggesting that leaving the offerings there for two weeks proved that I knew nothing about Shinto and certainly couldn’t have written a useful book about it.

Now, that blog post was written more than ten years ago, and I do not leave my offerings up for two weeks now, nor do I recommend it. However, the question is not that simple. So much so that it has taken me several weeks to track down the necessary information.

I have just made some more back issues of the Patreon essays available for purchase. First, on Amazon, there is Myths of Creation and Amaterasu. This combines two of my past essays, Shinto Myths and Myths of Amaterasu, and explains the sources for early Shinto myths, and the role they have played in Shinto and Japan, before going on to retell some of the myths. They include the variant forms of the myths found in different sources, which can sometimes be really different. Parts of these essays are included in… Read More »New Back Issues

The March 29th issue of Jinja Shinpō had an interesting article about a new feature of Fuji Sengen Jinja, a jinja in Oyama, in Shizuoka Prefecture. The town is very close to Mount Fuji, and the Sengen Jinja enshrine the kami of that mountain, identified as Konohanasakuyabimë, who is also identified with cherry blossoms. However, the article was not about the main sanctuary or the main kami. The precincts of the jinja include two large sugi trees (cryptomeria; Japanese cedar), which are known as “Husband-and-Wife Cedars”, because they grow close… Read More »Tree Spirits

Who gets to decide whether someone may practise Shinto, and whether they are doing it right? This is, it turns out, a really hard question. The obvious answer might well be “Jinja Honchō”. It is, after all, the largest Shinto organisation in Japan, representing the overwhelming majority of mainstream jinja. There are two problems with this answer. The first is that Jinja Honchō avoids, as a matter of policy, deciding either of those issues. I have been told, on several occasions, to phrase things more indirectly because they do not… Read More »Who Decides?