Drawing The Divine Closer: Shinto & Animism
In Christian culture, it’s common to project meaning onto an object, either through reminiscence and nostalgia, or through the symbolism of what an object represents elsewhere in our own lives and the lives of others. But the idea within animistic religions such as Shinto that things in the world, often naturally occurring, hold memory, hold traces and the spirits of their own inanimate existence, or are inhabited by the divine itself, not only causes them to fix in place, but more importantly, transposes the divine from distant and abstract to intimate and concrete.
Shinto belief that an object accumulates memory over its lifespan, absorbing and housing the divine, infuses the sacred into a reality which is consequentially and naturally all around us. This is in sharp contrast to a secular modern world which is increasingly emptied of the supernatural by ever accelerating scientific, technological, and evolutionary perspectives. Such belief that natural objects in the world don’t just represent the divine, but are the divine, or house the divine, puts the mystery back into an explained and rationalized world without it becoming abstracted. The rock doesn’t just represent the divine, it is the place where the divine is made manifest.
More specifically, such belief locks in place the divine, precluding it from traveling. In the move from abstraction to the material, it becomes fixed in place, and in the case of Shinto, primarily exclusive to Japan. Other faiths motivate the importance of place, but often that place itself is abstract. Heaven and Hell. The afterlife. Mount Olympus. They are up there or down there, but they’re deliberately not manifest on earth itself. We attach significance to places where divine events occurred, such as Bethlehem, or the pilgrimage sites of the Varanasi or Mecca, but they are pilgrimages to events in the past, not the material reality of the present. Through mythology and scripture, we are passed stories of breaches between there and here, but they are not naturally occurring parts of our world.
But in doing so, animism reduces the idea that the divine is distant, either physically or in time. For Shinto believers in animism, there is no similar requirement to commune with the Brahma by casting out bandhu as in Hinduism, or to kneel before a symbolic representation of the crucifixion as in Christianity. For Christians, who believe that the son of God was made manifest and walked the earth, even if they feel His presence, it is not actually, literally manifest in their lives as it is in Shinto. It’s a belief which is abstracted, and something we feel. It's not tactile. We can’t smell it. We can’t see it. Yet we still believe strongly that it’s there.
This fostering of the divine in the everyday divides one’s divine experience between Christianity and Shinto into a binary between the ultimate and the immediate. Shinto and animistic faith attributes resonance and religious fortitude to the immediacy of objects, whereas Christianity attributes it to the symbolic depictions of the ultimate. And in doing so, if the divine is pulled into the real world, inhabiting the objects around us, it motivates a spiritual life based on observance and vigilance. It’s faith as witness. Shinto followers live lives of religious vigilance, but it’s also a faith of natural surveillance. If the divine inhabits the objects around you, it sees all. Christian faith also carries belief in surveillance from the divine, but it is distant and abstract. God is watching, but He’s not physically manifest in the same room as you.
The extent to which the divine is manifest within inanimate objects, the spirit which inhabits them, is transmogrified into the kami, the spirits of the natural world, who punish transgressions, reward worship, and form an important part of Japanese mythology. Kami protect those who worship, are honored in house shrines, and are closely associated with natural phenomenon such as mountains, trees and rivers. But they’re not monsters in the traditional Japanese tradition of Yokai. Kami are spirits of the divine which reside in natural objects, whereas Yokai are more commonly associated with folklore, superstition and ultimately, fiction.
But where Christianity and Shinto find common ground is in the shared limbic space of belief in the supernatural. Animists contend that it’s the supernatural all around us, and the divine in real-world object which, for example, causes the plants to grow, but also for wounds to heal. Offending the supernatural carries consequence in the real world in the form of real-world injury, whereas for Christians, divine offence against God through sin diminishes one’s already abstract relationship with Him.
In drawing the divine closer to our immediate surroundings, Shinto, and other forms of animistic belief draw distinction between the abstractions of the ultimate and the materiality of the immediate. It closes the time and space between us and the divine, but in doing so, fixes in place these objects, and precludes the broader dissemination of such beliefs. No less powerful and meaningful than other religions, in making it less abstract and more real, it consequentially results in a community which in comparison is specific and small.
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