Issue 277 of Shintō Shūkyō included thirty short reports on research presentations made at the conference. I am not going to write about all of them here, but there are four that I want to pick up and introduce. The first is “The Characteristics of the Dead in Ancient Times”, by Kobayashi Norihiko. That is the official English title, but the Japanese title is explicit that the report is about the spirits of the dead.
Dr Kobayashi argues that in ancient times, which means the eighth and ninth centuries AD in this context, rites for the kami and rites for the dead were regarded as separate. The same term, “matsuri (祭)”, was used for both, and the same offerings, “hōhei (奉幣)”, were made at both, but they were distinct in purpose. Rites for the kami had two purposes: regular matsuri were held to ask for blessings, and special matsuri were held when it seemed that the kami was cursing the people, and needed to be appeased.
On the other hand, for the dead, a record from the late eighth century seems to mean that these rites, carried out at the mausolea of past Tennō, were regarded as inauspicious, which clearly separates them from the rites for the kami. At the same period, divination tied some curses to the spirit of Sudō Tennō, who was appeased with rites at his mausoleum. Sudō Tennō was a special case — a so-called onryō, who had died under bad circumstances, and come back to curse the living. Indeed, Sudō Tennō was never Tennō during his life. As Prince Sawara, he was Crown Prince at one point, but he lost out in political manoeuvring, the details of which are now obscure, and was either executed, murdered, or committed suicide. Kanmu Tennō made him Tennō posthumously in response to his presumed curses.
In the early ninth century, a couple of decades later, divination assigned the cause of some disasters to the curses of “regular” deceased Tennō. The Tennō at the time, Saga Tennō, objected that there was no precedent for this, and later in the century the court had to decide whether to follow Saga Tennō or the divinations, and opted for the divination. This started a custom of rites for deceased Tennō for relief from disasters.
However, Dr Kobayashi says that there is no sign of rites directed at the dead asking for blessings in this period, and argues that rites for ancestral kami and for human ancestors were clearly distinct.
This is an interesting claim, as it suggests that “ancestor worship” was a distinct tradition within Shinto. However, the summary is not clear what Kobayashi thinks the purpose of the standard rites for the dead was, just that he does not think it was asking for blessings. He also notes that the court condemned rites that invited the spirits of the dead to possess people, or asked them for blessings, which makes it clear that the general population did do such things.
My sense of the evidence, reinforced by this research report, is that dead people and kami are not quite the same thing in Shinto tradition, or perhaps it would be better to say that there are kami who are dead people and kami who are not, and that they play slightly different roles. But the details are, as always, unclear.