Failing to Capture Spirits : Rethinking the Role of the Listening to the Spirits in Popular Religion

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Other Title
  • 霊魂をとらえ損ねる --神の声から考える民衆宗教大本--
  • レイコン オ トラエ ソコネル : カミ ノ コエ カラ カンガエル ミンシュウ シュウキョウ オオモト

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Description

This essay reevaluates the significance of the technique of listening to divine speech in the history of religion in modern Japan, examining in particular the case of the Ōmoto sect. The thought and practice of Ōmoto in the Taishō period opened the way to direct communication with the spirits, and their mythical worldview was considered to be heterodox by the modern nation. Yet their practice shared with the modern emperor system and Yasukuni shrine an orientation towards controlling and organizing the spirits. The Ōmoto spirit-listening technique chinkon-kishin invoked, appeased, and assigned a hierarchical ranking to the spirits ; it invoked them in order to appease and assign the ranks of higher/lower and reconstructive/healing. In actual practice, however, indeterminate factors limited this control and let the spirits escape. The order established by Deguchi Onisaburō and Asano Wasaburō was betrayed by uncontrollable spirits and surplus desire. It was the excessive desire of the believers, not Onisaburō's system, that had the potential to undermine the premise of the State Shinto. Chinkon-kishin should be reappraised as a system that activated the desire of the people against the desire of the nation. This practice and theory illuminated the ambiguity of a popular desire that supported the emperor system and deviated from it at the same time, and thereby disclosed the unmitigated tension within the disposition of the people. This failure to capture the spirits illustrates the potential of Taishō period Ōmoto as a popular religion that could not be reduced to the logic of the emperor system.

Journal

  • 人文學報

    人文學報 108 143-158, 2015-12-30

    THE INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN HUMANITIES, KYOTO UNIVERSITY

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