Shinto to paganism, tradition to colonial identity

>Have you ever been to Japan? If so I'm curious on your take on shrine culture, any aspects of material culture, layout, the way people used the space, or ritual performance that stood out to you.

>Yes, I took these pictures and video. This was my third trip to Japan.

Could you be more specific?

>I guess I'm just hopeful about the potential of shrines and shrine precincts as a locus for pagan revival (not necessarily in the reconstructionist sense) in the west.

*Their construction isn't something that will be forever out of the financial reach of either individuals and communities. And in their scope and openness of usage it seems logical they will both be more common than temples as well as precursors to temples when they arise.

Temples seem to be talked about in pagan circles far more than (public) shrines, but other than the obvious romantic appeal, I personally doubt the practicality of going from diffuse individual practice, or working in small groups, to establishing a temple.

What is a temple traditionally? A means of showcasing the wealth and power of a deity. Idols of gold need to be kept under lock and key. A shrine can be modest. A shrine is more open and welcoming, it implies a certain freedom to approach the deity honoured there in the visitors own way (or at least at their own pace). Especially given the highly individualistic onus of contemporary western culture, this seems like a more natural fit than the rigid structure implied by the temple (as well as less threat of guaranteed interaction with minders of whatever position).

and given the sheer amount of vacant churches (at least in this country) I have to question the relevance of the temple as locus for religious expression in the contemporary society. If even a religion that essentially mandates them for structured worship can't keep them open, dreaming of them for religions that don't have instruction books strikes me as skipping at least one step.

Having said all that I've visited shinto shrines in Japan, and I'm aware there are patterns of ritual action that are expected, as well as patterns of action that arise from the structure of the shrine precinct, and I'm not suggesting a 1-to-1 transposing of Japanese shrine culture to the west (there are countless western shrine forms that are ripe for revival, let alone novel forms, and western garden/landscape theory has rich roots in paganism and occultism) I'm just wondering if anyone else sees any inspiration there for what is possible within the confines of current social reality in the developed world.

>Is there a difference between a shrine and a temple? In Japan, the former word is used to imply Shinto, and the latter Buddhism, but aside from that?

>I honestly can't say I interacted at all with any of the Buddhist temples in Japan and for Japan specificity the distinction may rest more in what religion is served (I am aware of the problems with cleanly separating Buddhism and Shinto).

But I guess the line of separation I am drawing is between outdoor shrines (which functionally, for visitors, Shinto shrines are) and buildings, serving a religion, people enter (often to be lead in worship).

>I'd certainly like to see a more Shinto-ish approach to paganism. Like you, I like the mostly outdoorsness of shrines, as there's more connection with nature, and also the way you can just drop in to a shrine any time.

But I believe the source of the problem is cultural intelligibility. If you look at Romuva in Lithuania, or perhaps even Hellenismos in Greece, what they are doing is something that can be more-or-less recognised by the wider culture in those countries as "our old religion" and expressions of cultural identity. Hellenismos means "Greekness", after all, and the folks doing it refer to themselves as ethnikoi, nationals.

That sort of thing is more difficult to do in other countries where knowledge of ancestral paganism has largely been lost. It's hard enough in Britain for example, where the ancestors were heathen but Roman and Greek gods are better known, and it's even harder in the United States where cultural identity is shallow and/or divided.

>I really can't speak for America, at all, but there is a strong connection in the British pagan milieu through both the creative and academic intelligentsia, as well as practice in the land, and the cultural realities of empire (including empire in the British isles themselves), towards the Roman religion, especially it's feteing of the Greeks.

America is also a special case in the English speaking world in that it is so heavily germanic, where the German population of the empire largely assimilated during the great war.

Basically I think the British soul tends either Celtic or Roman, Kipling being a prime (and still pertinent) example of the later.

Having said that, the case of colonial societies is complicated, and in an ideal world religious understanding would be drawn primarily from the land.

A problem is we lack people with the vision and authority to recognise the sacred. Another one (though one that it's possible to work with, rather than necessarily needing to be overcome) is the cultural sympathies brought with us from Britain, which effect how we view our surroundings.

Considering the world as it is I don't think there is a one size fits all answer, each territory will just have to feel it's way forward, in a halting and starting manner.

Greek colonists in Italy brought their gods with them, the Romans and Etruscans took up the Greek gods through trade, The Celts of Roman Britain incorporated their gods into Roman modes of worship. There's always going to be a basis of tradition even if it's engaged unconsciously, I just don't think it -needs- to be a ethnic basis. Tradition doesn't follow DNA.

There are territories where an emphasis on the ethnicity as a vector for reviving tradition makes sense (but even there they should be open to self reflection on where they are heading) but holding it as a one size fits all primary driver, or valuing it over other approaches leads to counter productive attempts to apply it in territories where other expressions of commonality would meet more success.

Take all this with two caveats though. 1) I say this as a New Zealander 2) I tend toward the devotional polytheist camp, in that I think the reality of the gods is what practice emanates from, rather than an adherence to "correct" performance being the basis of an individuals identity as a pagan.

>Probably in England at least the Germanic gods are rather better known than Celtic ones, though even they come in third place behind Roman and Greek. There's a lot to be said for modern British druidry in its sacralisation of the land, though it's of dubious Celticness. But almost all the paganism of the British soul has been washed away by Christianity.

I see the gods as parts of the world (natural and cultural), as interpreted through culture. So for instance I have no problem plainly identifying Ares and Mars, or whatever, since they both simply are war. But different cultures make different-shaped "parts", so they never perfectly match up.

I found this quote here about Greek religion that gets at what I mean about interpretation (or "articulation") of the world in the context of culture:

"Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood writes in Oxford Readings in Greek Religion, Oxford 2000: "Greek religion is, above all, a way of articulating the world, of structuring chaos and making it intelligible: it is a model articulating a cosmic order guaranteed by a divine order which also (in complex ways) grounds human order, perceived to be incarnated above all in the properly ordered and pious polis, and providing certain rules and prescription of behaviour, especially towards the divine through cult, but also towards the human world." She also writes that it "...was not a dogmatic schema demanding faith, but an open system proposing certain articulations of the world and transversed by the fundamental Greek category of unknowability.""

This implies that a religion is inseparable from its larger culture: you can import parts into a different culture, essentially grafting it on to existing traditions, but it ends up being essentially a new religion, with necessarily different meanings and interpretations. And if the existing traditions are largely monotheist, it's going to be quite shallow. Right now Wicca and the aforementioned Druidry seem to have the best claim to authentic British cultural religion even though their roots are strictly modern. At least some of their tropes are sort-of-familiar as religion to the wider British public.

Anyway, I see practice, and indeed the gods, as emanating from culture and from the present world, in particular the land and its history of cultural use.

>"almost all the paganism of the British soul has been washed away by Christianity."

It's an easy assertion to make, being that it plays into common lines of Christian propaganda that the academic community has also uncritically internalised, but there is a reason the pagan revival has largely emanated from there, whatever one may think of the rigour of it's offerings.

There is more to paganism than blood.

"This implies that a religion is inseparable from its larger culture: you can import parts into a different culture, essentially grafting it on to existing traditions, but it ends up being essentially a new religion, with necessarily different meanings and interpretations. And if the existing traditions are largely monotheist, it's going to be quite shallow"

I guess this comes down to how you view history in regards to the gods. If you view it as a binary paganism is alive/ paganism is dead, and put an exclusive value on continuity of practice then you're going to have a bad time.

If you approach history as a tableau where the gods are apprehended to a greater or lesser degree at various points, then you can fit modern understandings into a pattern stretching back to prehistory and judge their validity against how the gods were understood in the past and the relevance of that understanding to our current relationship with them.

I'm of the view that the best understanding considers how they were viewed at all points rather than arbitrarily picking one point and declaring it the point of departure from whence we can never return.

I think we both agree paganism arises from man's experience of his environment, and I don't think -at its core- the human response has changed radically from what it was 2000 years ago. We aren't aliens to the man of the year zero.

Of course this whole discussion is complicated by the situation of late capitalism, which alienates us from the land and the collective to an extreme degree and makes us easily moulded by rhetoric and propaganda. By the same token though it's all illusion and bullshit so just as easily moulded by those on the receiving end through their own rhetoric and mytheopoetic activity. The post-modernist dilemma, because of the solution we inhabit we can present ourselves (humanity) as anything, rendering discussion as inconclusive as a mud wrestling match between eels.

All things being equal, if you dropped the pagan of 2000 years ago and the pagan of today into each others milieu they would both integrate with the surrounding religious community relatively painlessly. (since I feel like I am inviting an argument about human sacrifice, lets say the ancient example is Rome in the time of Numa Pompilius, where the accepted sacrificial offering is grain. Generalising about such a massively diffuse umbrella as the contemporary pagan community is always going to be fraught).

"the land and its history of cultural use."

 I think there is something deeper going on as well though. The land has it's own resonances that use builds upon and it depends upon the land and the use as to which is stronger. Some topographies have stronger personalities than others, and where they have barely been touched all you can feel is their vast indifference.

>To be clear, it's not blood, genetics, or DNA that matters, it's culture. It's the culture you were raised in, or at least have been involved in, that makes the religion intelligible.
The way I see it, people have a natural impulse towards religion, and specifically pagan kinds of religion. During times in Europe when the church was powerful, it went to great effort to continually suppress pagan religious expressions of the people. But now that the pressure is off, new pagan religious culture is very slowly being generated. It's been going on since the Enlightenment, and probably informed the Romantic and other movements. I think modern British paganism owes more to that thread of tradition than to pre-Christian paganism, although the latter has provided some mythological frameworks.
What I most admire about Shinto is its rootedness in the culture and the land, so much so that it's an ordinary, deeply normal, "unmarked" activity, even considered culturally conservative. (Admittedly the huge wooden penis thing is exceptional...)
"The land has it's own resonances that use builds upon and it depends upon the land and the use as to which is stronger. Some topographies have stronger personalities than others, and where they have barely been touched all you can feel is their vast indifference."

Yes, my experience is similar.

>I'd move back the eve of it's generation to at least the early renaissance.
Ultimately there is something in us that rejects monotheism as false, whether it has something that has arisen slowly since the inception of the cult of beauty and reappraisal of the value of classical literature that was such a driving force in the renaissance or if it was there the whole time kept dormant and suppressed by religious authorities.
The task of overturning the Christian world-view within ourselves is a gradual process and some have gotten further with it than others. The important thing at this point is to keep going, and the further we liberate ourselves the more important our sympathies with pre-christian understandings (as well as the understandings of our direct predecessors who were in sympathy with them) will become.