I have recently read a very interesting book on medieval British history, Twilight of the Godlings. (That’s an affiliate link, and this book is in English.) It traces the history of fairies, looking at how belief in fairies related to and developed from earlier pagan beliefs, and, indeed, Christian beliefs. (As the book points out, one of the gods imported under the Roman Empire clearly did survive in Britain — Christ.)
The very high-level summary is as follows. Fairies and the like appear to play the same role as pagan “godlings” — supernatural beings with a lower status than the Olympian gods, like Jupiter. However, the details of the beliefs are completely different, and so they cannot be described as “pagan survivals”.
The interesting thing from a Shinto perspective is just how much like kami the Romano-British godlings sound. They are associated with natural features or ancestors, do not have defined areas of responsibility (like “God of War”, for example), and do not seem to have been portrayed as human before the influence of Roman religion. The number of godlings associated with a particular place is ambiguous, as is their gender in many cases. There are multiple names that might refer to the same godling, single names that might refer to multiple godlings, and names that might be titles that apply to multiple beings rather than picking out a single godling.
In terms of this book’s framework, then, Shinto could be described as godlings all the way up. While the author (Young) argues that Romano-British religion had gods at the top, the Olympians, Shinto does not really have a level like that. Shinto-based new religions often involve a superior kami, and thus could be seen as creating that level. Similarly, one could argue that Buddhists put buddhas in at the higher level, and that State Shinto was trying to do the same for Amaterasu Ōmikami. While the Buddhist superstructure was extremely important for a thousand years, and State Shinto for eighty, neither suppressed the practices concerning the godlings. Indeed, not even modern society has done that, as the most cursory glance at contemporary Japan proves.
“Godlings” is obviously a word coined by secular scholars to deprecate the importance of the beings involved. Despite all the similarities, I cannot recommend it as a translation of “kami”. On the other hand, “fairy” does not work either, because of the heavily western connotations of that word, and the rather odd direction it went in the nineteenth century. (The book mentions this, but Young only investigates the process up to around 1600.)
Young argues that another feature of godlings is that they are chthonic, a word which is primarily associated with subterranean things, but also means things of the earth, rather than of the heavens. This might remind one of the kami of the earth, the kunitsukami, but in this sense the amatsukami, the kami of the heavens, also seem to be chthonic. The point is that they exist in our world, and that you can get to them by walking (and swimming, perhaps). Given the number of places in Japan that claim to be Takamanohara, it is plainly not generally seen as another world, or another dimension. A more neutral word for this is “immanent”, which is opposed to “transcendent”, and means something that is part of our world, rather than separate from, and above, it. In that sense, fairies are immanent, and the Christian god is transcendent; kami are immanent, and buddhas are transcendent.
Godlings, fairies, and kami, then, could be described as ways of dealing with the immanent supernatural. One might then argue that the reason for the striking similarities in these practices across multiple cultures is the same as the reason for striking similarities in eating practices across multiple cultures: in all cultures, human beings are dealing with the same problems, and hit on similar solutions. Just as with food culture, of course, there are also important differences between cultures, and practices within a particular culture change over time.
We can then say that Shinto is the Japanese practices of engagement with the immanent supernatural.
Like any other definition of Shinto, this does not work, because it has the consequence that State Shinto was not Shinto. On the other hand, I do think that it might be a useful lens, both for looking at Shinto in Japan across time and space, and for thinking about which practices in other countries should be compared to Shinto.
I like “the immanent supernatural” quite a lot! It feels like a pretty good description of Deity as I understand it/them.
Is there any Shinto reception of the kind of experiences that we’d nowadays link to the UFO phenomenon? It’s often noted how similar much UFO lore seems to be to older European fairy lore (abductions, weird sex stuff, strange foods, ambiguous links with the dead/the ancestors, odd messages). I would be surprised if there aren’t any Shinto NRMs that lean heavily into this angle, but I’d be especially delighted if there was a little semi-official jinja in the mountains somewhere where some loggers thought they saw a flying saucer crash in 1957.
Not that I am aware of, I am afraid. The “kamikakushi” tradition matches the older European fairy lore quite well, but I haven’t heard about any jinja linked with alien spaceships.
Human spaceships, yes. There are a couple of jinja where JAXA staff pray for safe launches and astronauts for safe flights.
Mind you, if there is a UFO jinja, I would not expect the Shinto establishment to pay much attention to it, so I could easily have simply not come across it.
Basically, this part of Shinto’s understanding is quite confusing. Why? If we look at Shinto scholars in the Edo era, such as Hirata Atsutane and Motori Noorinaga, they view Takamagahara, Yomi, and Tokoyo as worlds unrelated to the material world where humans live. This means that this is contrary to Shinto shrines that claim to be Takamagahara. The existence of Takahamagahara or Yomi in the material world where humans live only occurred centuries after the true understanding of the existence of that world. This reminds me of a place in India, Kurukshetra, which claims to be “where Brahma created the world.” But Hindus still believe that Brahma did not create the universe there traditionally. So the existence of Takamagahara as something material experiences the same position as Brahma Sarovar in India. It is too early to say that Takamagahara is part of the immanent.
Although I consider takamagahara or Yomi not traditionally situated in the material world of humans, I still agree that kami live among humans and the tasks they perform clearly fit the definition of immanence. Immanence, in a religious context, can be defined as a God possessing form, personal nature, gender, and attributes.
I also think the reason why Amatsukami in Shinto have a chthonic character is because they are depicted that way. Similarly, the highest pantheon of Hindu and Hellenistic deities is also chthonic.
Thanks for the comment.
This is confusing and inconsistent, because Shinto has never worried that much about internal coherence. People say things that look contradictory because they are not worried about being consistent with claims that other members of the Shinto community have made. It is, however, important to remember that Norinaga and Atsutanë are late figures, and that their claims to be rediscovering “original” Shinto are only claims. Both were influenced by later theories, and Atsutanë, in particular, seems to have been influenced by Christianity.
It does seem to me that the idea of transcendent divinity has never been mainstream in Shinto, and that there is a steady pull back to the immanent.