First off, I must explain, this book does not exist. This is a completely preposterous statement to make about something I am about to give a review of, so let me explain. Firstly, there most certainly exists a number of physical books that present themselves as Japanese Shamanism by Percival Lowell. There was once upon a time a man known as Percival Lowell, and he wrote the text found within these books presented as his work.
This book does not exist.
What Percival Lowell did not do was write a book called ”Japanese Shamanism”. Instead, in 1894 he wrote Occult Japan : or, The way of the gods : an esoteric study of Japanese personality and possession. The physical object pictured above is a bootleg, born out of the fact that Lowell's work has gone into the public domain. As far as I can tell, the contents within it are more or less the same.
This strange literary afterlife of Lowell is born out of the current age hell-bent on monetizing everything that could be monetized, and I don't recommend anyone buy this. Indeed, if I had spent any substantial money on it I would have been disappointed. The layout of the book is of very questionable quality, it really feels like someone just printed out a pdf file with no consideration to how it would look on paper at all. On some level it was stupid of me to buy this thing, but my curiosity was roused by the fact that this lacked all publisher information, and the second hand price was rather low... You can spare the effort and waste of money by reading it in here: https://archive.org/details/occultjapanorwa00lowe/mode/2up
I personally have no regrets about getting this though, as it introduced me to a quite fascinating figure I was not aware of before. Percival Lowell (1855-1916) was an American multi-talent, a businessman, author, mathematician and an astronomer. His biggest claims to fame are related to astronomy. He furthered speculations that there might be canals on Mars, and pushed for the idea that there is a ninth planet in the Solar system. These efforts culminated in the discovery of Pluto after his death.
Lowell's efforts in the field of astronomy were eternalized into the astronomical symbol for pluto, which is a ligature of P and L – I assumed it came from the name of Pluto, but apparently it's for Percival Lowell. Pluto has of course been demoted to a planetoid, and while the canals of Mars may have passed into fantasy, the world of astronomy is still haunted by the hunt for the elusive ninth planet, this time around thought to be a very large, extremely remote object.
Before Lowell turned his effort into the celestial realms, he was a cotton industrialist and a traveller of the Far East. He wrote books about his travels in Japan, include the aforementioned Occult Japan. The two others are Noto: an Unexplored Corner of Japan and Collected Writings on Japan and Asia, including Letters to Amy Lowell and Lafcadio Hearn. Lowell thus has a direct connection to the famous folklorist Lafcadio Hearn whom Touhou fans might mostly know as the guy who shares a surname with Maribel Hearn. Hearn was of course much more than that, and put considerable effort into preserving Japanese folklore.
Travelogues and spiritual manias
Noto and Occult Japan both fall into a kind of genre of travel literature, of outsiders going to explore what was at the time a poorly understood corner of the world. Japan at that time was very much a new place to the West. Meiji Restoration had occurred mere 26 years earlier, terminating a long period of isolationism. Lowell's work is very much of its day, there is certainly something of an aura of exoticism to it all, and as we will later see, some elements that are hard to call anything but racism. When it comes to that, Lowell's text is nowhere near the worst though, but it is what it is.
The flowery and dated language of the text is a matter of taste and literacy. Some of the words he uses certainly are outside of modern everyday English lexicon. The Japanese terminology is at times slightly confusing too. Whether this is due to terminology, pronounciation or transcription changing over time or the Western knowledge base of Japan in the 1880s being substantially more limited than it is today, there were a few headscratchers in the book. If someone wanted to read the book as just a travel story, it wouldn't bother the reader. However, for people wanting to do further research, some of the terms become a dead-end.
Lowell described practices and rituals from Shinto, Buddhism and a form of syncretic tradition which he calls ”ryobu”, apparently referring to ryobu-Shinto. Ryobu-Shinto was a form of Shinto born during the Muromachi period, where Shinto adopted many rituals and practices from Shingon Buddhism, an esoteric strand of Buddhism in Japan. It's rather curious to see the term emerge in the aftermath of the shinbutsu bunri, a Meiji-era campaign to forcibly separate Shinto and Buddhism. Some of the ”ryobu” he describes might actually be Shugendo practices, as he locates Mt. Ontake, a Shugendo holy site, as an important center of this ”ryobu”. As Shugendo was outlawed by the Meiji government in 1872, not outing yourself as a practitioner of it would have been wise. So perhaps this identity of "ryobu" was a way to circumvent this ban.
At times it's rather confusing which exact sect the practices described belong to, except for Buddhist practices, which form their own small section. Then again, Lowell himself might have struggled to draw the lines between Shinto and the ”ryobu”. Even today there are some practices like waterfall purifications that cross the borders of traditions in Japan, and trying to attribute some particular practice to some sect might be pointless hair-splitting. In general, East Asian spiritual traditions appear to very much have a history of taking whatever practices and ideas that appeared interesting, useful, or for the lack of better term, cool from each other.
The great strengths of Lowell's work are it's liveliness and how it portrays a very interesting moment in history and a topic that could have easily been ignored as superstitious garbage by many. It's firstly and foremostly a travel book and only secondly an attempt to explain anything, and he does a great job at providing very vivid depictions of Japanese life and rituals at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Based on this text, it strikes me as a rather magical time. The various shamanistic and religious practices he describes were extremely commonplace despite the Meiji regime's attempts at curbing out ”superstition”. It's a rare look at spiritual life in middle Meiji-era Japan. The attempt at consolidating Shinto into a national religion had begun in 1871, but they would reach their peak only decades after the publication of this book.
I wonder if the situation Lowell describes was the historical norm or an anomaly. After all, the Meiji restoration was preceded by the ”Ee Ja Naika” phenomenon, a mix of political protest, dancing mania and religious frenzy driven by reports of miracles such as rains of omamori talismans. The overall supernatural mania was mixed with prophecies of imperial authority being restored over the ruling shogunate – a prophecy that came to pass.
The West had also suffered its own spiritual mania of kinds from the 1840s onwards in the form of spiritism. Kicking off from the United States, this phenomenon where an ever increasing number of people claimed to be able to commune with the spirits of the dead was reaching its peak in the late 1800s. While I am personally in the belief that people can commune with the spirit world (in case that was unclear to anyone), the moment did gather a number of scam artists exploiting the sensationalism and people's desire to connect with deceased loved ones. Thus the sceptical countermove was necessary.
This ”spirit of the times” colors Lowell's Occult Japan, and he compares the Western phenomenon of spirit mediumship to Japanese practices, and finds a number of differences between the two. Spiritism saw a lot of people doing their best to explain all of the instances of spirit communication and related phenomena as fakery explainable by tricks. There is some of this in Lowell's book, particularly when he deals with allegedly miraculous practices. Lowell is indeed very much in the physicalist camp, though to his credit he sees the shamanic trance states as real (as confirmed by his own medical experiments) even though he doesn't believe in spirits in the sense that most spiritual people would.
Boiling water, live coals and other feats
Lowell deals with four types of magico-shamanistic-religious practices, three which he puts under the category of miracles and one which he puts into its own class of possession. Great effort is put into describing these practices and what is involved in them, and it's one of this texts' greatest merits. Lowell's lively, flowery style highlights a kind of raw, primordial quality to the practices. There's a lot of chanting, twisting of hands, yelling, grunting and splashing of water going on. Crowds gather and take part, and Lowell describes the triumph and fumbles of particularly notable participants in these practices. But Lowell also does explain the particular arrangements of the rituals, so it's not empty sensationalism or exoticism either, even though his understanding of the theology and meaning behind the rituals is lacking.
The first three practices are what Lowell calls miracles. These are rituals which demonstrate seemingly superhuman feats, commonly performed to an audience which can take part in them. The first of these miracles he describes is the ”kugadachi” or trial by boiling water. Lowell states that in ancient times it was used to determine if someone was guilty of crimes or not, but has in his time been used mostly to demonstrate some kind of Shinto religious sense of purity. The practice involved a Shinto ceremony where a huge cauldron was placed within a ”mystic square”, and once the water was brought to boil the priest would use bamboo fronds to splash himself and the audience with scalding hot water, building into a trance-like state with furious repetition. Successful participants would report not feeling pain from the hot water.
Lowell details a quite interesting detail in the anecdote: the Japanese apparently believed that hot and cold water were different substances, and that the spirit of cold water resided in the Moon. This traditional belief is possibly another possible source for the Moon's watery connections in the lore of Touhou. The apparently rapid cooling of the water is explained to Lowell by the spirit of cold water descending via ”proper paths” in the air, compared to fissures and veins by him by a priest. Thus a mountain is the appropriate location. Lowell finds water boiling at lower temperatures in higher altitudes an explanation more to his liking.
The second miracle is the present-day linguistics & kana-defying ”huvatari” (fuwatari?), or walking on embers. This is exactly what it sounds like, though the particular details of the rituals varied between Shugendo and Shinto practices. This was apparently always a collective experience, with many people taking part in walking over the bed of burning embers. Lowell details how people of all ages and ranks took part, some extremely assured that they would pass without harm, some much less so. The general belief was that if one was pure they would pass unharmed, and by doing so could acquire ”many benefits”, exact nature of which is left unstated. Lowell even mentions a case of a very young girl being carried in the lap of a kannushi over the fire, too young to do so on her own.
While the Japanese believe that it was purity that allowed them to perform this feat, Lowell finds more thermodynamic explanations. He proposes that the copious amounts of salt laid on the wood before they are burnt somehow acts as an insulator. Furthermore, he states that the soles of the Japanese feet are thicker and more calloused than Western ones – whether this was true or not at the time, I lack the competency to comment on. I do imagine that the rural Japanese would have been involved in a fair bit more walking than urban Westerners in the late 19th century.
The third miracle is tsurugi-watari, a trial of climbing a ladder of blades. This too was a communal event, with all manner of people taking part in it. Indeed, the ladder of blades was constructed from katana-type blades loaned from the community. If one is to think that climbing on blades sounds quite hazardous, they are right, and not everyone who took part could do so without coming to harm. This seems to have been the exception than the norm, as the event Lowell witnessed had only a single case of injury. Interestingly enough, the Japanese blamed the blade and not the person. Upon investigation found that the katana had been used to kill a dog recently and had not been properly purified after that. Lowell explains the feat with a mix of thick soles and a certain technique to the process of climbing. He notes that you can push a non-pointed part of a blade against the skin of a human with quite a lot of force before it cuts, as long as you don't make a horizontal slashing move.
While Lowell finds a physicalist explanation for all these events, there is one instance of what he calls a miracle that he finds harder to explain. It's an account of a Shinto priest managing to produce enough fire to lit Lowell's tobacco pipe without having any apparent means to do so. The priest simply calls out to the deities while squatting on a roof and eventually the pipe lights up on it's own. Lowell presents a magnifying glass trick as a possible explanation, but proceeds to deny such himself as the priest was wearing nothing but his ”loincloth” (likely a fundoshi) at the time, likely to make a point.
To play the physicalist's advocate here, Lowell himself mentions several times that flicking of sparks from flint and steel is used as a part of purification rituals. Such implements would be much more convenient to sneak into your undergarments, but would also presumably make quite a bit of noise and require rather obvious gesturing. The use of such sparks is quite fascinating, as it seems to have vanished from mainstream Shinto praxis into fantasy – perhaps for fire safety reasons.
Possessions
The fourth practice is what Lowell calls possession, where in this context a spirit enters into the body of a voluntary participant to interact with humans. More fitting term would therefore perhaps be ”channeling”. Forms of participation included the delivery of prophecies, both grander and smaller in scale, and healing. Lowell describes this practice being done by Shinto, syncretic and interestingly enough Buddhist practitioners alike. Both men and women are involved with these practices, with the Buddhists most commonly using women for this purpose. Possessions appeared to be relatively common during the time of the texts' writing, and they were occasionally used even for things such as naming babies.
The possession happens in a state of trance, which the participants attain through a mix of ascetic practices, sleep deprivation, chanting and some kind of meditation. Extensive purification practices precede the possessions, especially within Shinto and the syncretic practices. Interestingly enough drumming, commonly used among the North Eurasian shamanic peoples, is absent, despite there being historical evidence of it playing a role in Japanese shamanic practices. This was either the time when the wild kagura dance possessions had already passed into fantasy, or then Lowell for some reason simply paid no attention to them.
Asceticism, sleep deprivation and intense purification form the preparatory groundwork for the possession. The possession itself occurs in a ritualized context which varies from sect to sect. Lowell offers some quite colorful descriptions of these events in the text. Sometimes some very key details however seem to be lacking – do the young maidens who act as the spirit mediums for the Buddhists go through the same kind of ordeals as the syncretic practitioners do? Lowell is rather silent on the matter.
Trance states leading to possessions are described as being an extremely intense affair for the possessed. The participants go into a profoundly altered physical and mental state. Eyes roll backwards, the body stiffens and becomes unreceptive to pain such as being prodded with needles. Lowell found some opportunities to examine the pulse of people undergoing possession, and discovered marked abnormalities. At times the rapid, fluttering heartbeat seems to vanish entirely.
Coming out of the trance doesn't seem to be easy either, and requires the support of other participants. The possessed are slapped on the back to ”wake them up”, and many times others have to knead their arms and legs to make them return from the cramped state they have gone to. The possessed usually has no recall whatsoever of the events after they come out of it.
I've read other, contemporary accounts of shamanistic trance states that were extremely intense for the participants even hours after the experience itself had ended – dilated pupils, disorientation, abnormalities of the fluid cycle, slipping back into the altered state... Things like these definitely make me want to discourage people from experimenting with these techniques on their own. We in the West tend to be a bit too adventurous and self-reliant about these things, and I've certainly been guilty of such in the past.
Interestingly enough both Shinto and Buddhism tried to stake claim as to being the original source of the possession practices. Lowell thinks that Shinto is the original source, and his logic is sound, though he notes that there has likely been a historical disruption in the practices during the era of Buddhist dominance. His evidence is a bit unexpected, but reasonable, and it comes in the form of how ubiquitous the gohei is in the possession rituals.
Lowell is aware that the gohei is a ritual tool of Shinto origin, and observes it playing a crucial role in possessions of Shinto, Buddhist and syncretic nature. He observed no such ritual where the possessed didn't wield a gohei. Lowell likens it to a lightning rod through which the spirits descend – of note here is the earlier bit about spirits descending through ”proper paths”. Some merely hold the gohei, others rest it against the ground, and some use it for a bit more forceful assistance. The last technique involves pressing one end of the gohei against the ground, then leaning their weight on the gohei, pressing it against their forehead on a spot at the base of the nose, between the eyes. Lowell calls this the ”zone hypnotique” and says it's remarkable that the Japanese independently discovered it before the Europeans. Of some note might be that various meditation techniques that ask the user to focus on this ”third eye” also exist in various traditions.
No matter what technique is used regarding the gohei, the participants end up quite unwilling to let go off it. Often by the end of the possession the possessed grip the shaft of the gohei so hard that other participants must knead the arm to loosen the grip. This type of rigor-mortis-in-this-very-life is quite fascinating, as while I've read of other kinds of physical demanding effects of shamanic states, I've never stumbled upon other descriptions of such rigidity.
Meditation and pilgrimages
Lowell also touches on meditation and pilgrimages, both which he sees related to the practice of spirit possession. On the subject of meditation, Lowell conceptualizes it as a way to attain a trance state and ”make the mind blank” for the possession to occur. While certain meditative practices may no doubt be used for something like this he really doesn't seem to get the wider context of it. He views meditation through this lens of ”making the mind blank” and comes to the wrong conclusion that the ultimate aim of Buddhism is some process of scrubbing out all thoughts and complete passivity. Lowell's misconceptions are especially frustrating here because he later presents some interesting ideas about the nature of thought and self-identity which veer close to Buddhist ideas. Whether these were some sort of hidden Buddhist influence or his own musings is impossible to say.
Pilgrimages were extremely popular at the time of the texts' writing, and there is an entire section of the text devoted to describing the practices and activities of the pilgrim clubs. The clubs would pool together payments from the members, who could rank in hundreds, and then send a handful chosen by lottery for the pilgrimage every year. Popular destinations mentioned are the Ise Jingu, Mt. Fuji and Mt. Ontake. The pilgrims were highly respected and treated well, with an entire hospitality industry existing to cater to them. In premodern times, they were quite an arduous affair to undertake, taking months to complete.
The merit brought by the status of pilgrim would at times inspire even very unlikely individuals to undertake them. Lowell mentions that at times groups of girls in their early teens would band together, convince some members of the community to fund them in secret and then leave for a pilgrimage without telling their parents. Usually this would put the community in a short period of disarray, but the girls would not be blamed. On the contrary, they would be greeted with praise when they returned. While Lowell likely mentioned this as a bit of sensationalism – he writes how it ”goes against our sense of prorieteness” - something about young women displaying agency of their own in a spiritual context feels very ”Touhou”.
Lowell's attempts at explaining the phenomena
Coming from an era of debunking Western spiritistic movement and faced with a genuine, but unusual phenomena which the Westerners at the time lacked an understanding of, Lowell feels compelled to take a shot at explaining them. His explanations are a mixed bag to say the least. To his credit, he sees it as a real phenomena in the sense that the participants go into vastly altered states. He himself witnessed people completely ignoring external stimuli and presenting wildly abnormal physiological markers. Lowell notes that there are also fake possessions, yet these can be told apart by pricking the participant with a needle.
Rest of the explanations are a mix of moments of brilliance and severely ”fumbling the bag” as kids these days would call it. Starting with the good things, Lowell has some interesting ideas regarding the nature of human consciousness and the cultural context for possessions. The former of these include his insight into how much less coherent the human experience is than we generally give credit for and how we all experience altered, oblivious states of perception in the form of sleep and dreams.
Lowell likens the mind to a current, specifically an electric one, and sees altered states not only as functions of cellular function but a kind of ”conductivity” and ”resistance”. He boldly states that this idea of consciousness as an electrical current might be more literal than a metaphor. He was perhaps aware of very early research into electrical activity in the brain, which was first discovered in animals in 1875.
Some of Lowell's ideas veer rather close to Buddhist ideas about the impermanence of the self and his failure to understand Buddhism is all the more frustrating in this light. While I don't 100% fault Lowell alone for not having a perfect understanding of Buddhism and a Western person of his time – there would have been rather large massive and cultural issues – some parts of his output make me suspicious he might have been not very motivated to get it either. Lowell's text is, to be blunt about it, rather racist and at times sexist. Much of it is the kind of race-ism and sex-ism of the day, ie. seeing race and sex is primary explanatory factors for phenomena.
When it comes to sexism, it isn't that bad, but for example Lowell's explanation of wives becoming more like their husbands relies on some inherent emptiness of the female personality rather than the more obvious explanation of women finding it advantageous to conform to their husbands due to legal and cultural reasons of the time...
Unfortunately, regarding matters of race, it at times veers from the race-ism to just straight up racism, and the last section of the book is a rather grating read. Lowell's grand theory of Japanese spirit channeling goes something like this: The Japanese are an ”empty” people lacking force of personality and this lets abnormal phenomena like possessions take them over easily. Possession is not caused by spirits as understood in conventional sense. Rather, it is to Lowell some kind of an ultimate atavistic state, a regression into the primordial. Thus he arrives at the ”startling conclusion” (his own words) that since the Japanese regard the various deities as their ancestors, when they get possessed they get possessed by the ”spirit of their race” (his own words).
Whatever one makes of this all, it's probably best to examine some of the evidence he presents. For the ”emptiness” of the Japanese, he presents a collection of encounters and features of their culture. These seem to mostly boil down to misunderstandings. For example, the various confusions over customs seem to be just that, the rickshaw rider not asking Lowell for his destination before going off or servants doing their own thing are hardly constituting grand evidence for his case. Various other cultural evidence don't make much of a case here either. The use of negative space in art and the use of unfinished wood in Shinto structures come from entirely different things than some profound ”emptiness” of personality. Same goes for Lowell's understanding of Buddhism, though Buddhism has historically greatly struggled with its use of negative language for ultimately non-negative things.
Lowell also parades how Japanese culture has absorbed much from the Chinese and later on the West as an evidence of their lack of a character of their own. Adaptability is not the same as emptiness though, and Japan has also quite the history of resisting foreign influence, including the early conflicts with Buddhism and later the period of isolationism. Guns were welcome, Christianity was not. And what has come to Japan has been made their own, from their interpretations of Buddhism to karakuri clockwork dolls and their way of celebrating Christmas. Japan ultimately is anything but empty or lacking in a force of personality, and certainly stands out among the cultures of the world today.
It however should be noted that especially at the time of the texts' writing Japanese culture would have indeed been more conformist, collectivist and oriented around more rigid models of social interactions. If one follows a kind of motivated reasoning, it's indeed possible to fall into the same conclusions as him, especially in a time when the country's sense of self-identity was in a flux.
Lowell also couples these ideas of the Japanese ”emptiness” with the ideas of women being more ”empty” and comes to the conclusion that Japan is more ”feminine”. If one wanted to make such a case, there is some evidence that Japan might have pre-historically been a kind of matriarchal society. Even in later times many cultural figures such as Amaterasu Oomikami, Inari Okami, Kannon, Benzaiten and Empress Jingu were female deities or historical women of power.
Whether this is any evidence for a ”more feminine” nature of Japanese culture is up to you to decide, as the country has quite the number of masculine cultural heroes too and is arguably quite patriarchal. There's also been clear cases of women's authority being suppressed, relevant to this case being the way miko were relegated to assistants to the kannushi in Shinto. Perhaps it would be more reasonable to say that despite everything, the feminine aspects haven't been completely repressed and squashed, and things like Touhou might partly be a manifestation of that side of the culture.
As for becoming ”possessed by the spirit of their race”, there's no doubt that the ”Hyperborean Intellectval” types among us will find this a complete and satisfying answer. The problem of course becomes locating this ”spirit of the race”, which Lowell, otherwise retorting to quite physicalist explanations, refuses to do. For someone of his time, each race having its own essential characteristics was perhaps too self-evident. Even then, taking the position that such would exist, the job of locating it must be done.
Would the relatively diminutive differences in the genetics of human population account for such differences he perceives between Japanese and Western cases of spirit possession as Lowell perceives, especially presuming it really is some kind of a pure atavistic state? I personally doubt it. A more reasonable argument could be made that the different expressions in Japanese and Western possessions are ”cultural”, yet that is not Lowell's argument. And cultural arguments are ultimately insubstantial and leave the backdoor to the spirit world open, edging towards things like ”reverting to the stock of cultural archetypes”. And from ”archetypes” there is barely a step to pass to the other side of the backdoor.
Let's consider for a moment the most straightforward argument. Spirits are real and humans can communicate with them, channel them and become possessed by them. The differences between Japanese and Western spirit possessions can then be tracked down to differences between the types of entities communed with and the protocols for doing so. Since the Japanese would go into great pains for purification and communed with deities, it seems just obvious that the end result would be different from Western wildcat psychics communing with whatever entities they stumble upon with no precautions whatsoever. As for the seeming ease of spirit interaction, a culture that has a routine history of doing such would no doubt have an easier time than one where spirit contact was relegated into the realms of heresy by an imported monotheistic religion.
What has refused to pass into fantasy since Lowell's time
Much like the idea of a ninth planet that Lowell championed has refused to pass into fantasy, but has rather changed its shape, such has been the subject of his book. Rather than becoming entirely westernized as Lowell appears to have expected, given the ”emptiness” of it's inhabitants in his mind, Japan has maintained many of its ancient traditions and beliefs. These include some of the practices described within the book.
While spirit possessions are nowhere near as common as in Lowell's time, such do still apparently occur in Japan. I've stumbled upon a mention of them being practiced at the ”fringes of society”, mentioned as a curiosity, a ”psychological safety valve” which in that particular author's opinion allows the Japanese to act weird and boisterous for a moment. What you make of such is up to you.
Syncretic forms of Shinto and Buddhism, in particular Shugendo, haven't disappeared either, despite attempts by the Meiji government to squash it as a heretical sect. Even today some Japanese find a worthwhile cause in their ascetic pursuits, which still include the ember walking ritual. In fact, some of the shugendo groups have opened up to even foreigners, hoping to spread their hard-won wisdom to a new audience.
When it comes to Shugendo, it is worth mentioning that the area around Mt Iizuna (of Iizunamaru Megumu fame to Touhou fans) in Nagano, the prefecture where ZUN was born and lived his youth, is a Shugendo hotspot. The sacred peak of Mt. Ontake mentioned in Lowell's text too sits at the border of Nagano and Gifu and remains a site of Shugendo activity to this day. And there is of course the Mt. Haku Girl, from the time between the PC-98 and Windows Touhou games, training in Mt. Haku, which is a – you guessed it – sacred site to the Shugendo. These practices might have more to do with the birth of Touhou than one would imagine at first glance.
Pilgrimages too remain a thing to this day in Japan, and the hospitality industry built around it has pivoted towards serving people of more touristy nature too. You don't have to spend months on foot to stay at a Buddhist temple or visit Ise Jingu anymore, though I'm sure the extra effort would make it all the more special.
For those interested in understanding Japanese spiritual practices, ideas and beliefs, there is no better time than the present. Lowell's text has its merits as a snapshot of a very particular period in history, and it does make for an entertaining read. For learning purposes, there are better materials out there. If one has the means and the desire, one can even go and experience some of these things themself these days. Let's hope that overtourism does not close the doors to this possibility in the future. Such would be a tragedy, as I believe we have much to learn from the Japanese when it comes to matters of the spirit world. Spiritism might have been a fad, but the desire to connect with the subtle aspects of reality is eternal.
Lowell's ideas about consciousness being like an electric current are quite fascinating. He was of course quite prescient about it, as the definitive link between the electrical activity of the brain and states of consciousness was discovered only in the 1910s. What Lowell perhaps did not fully predict or appreciate is that electric phenomena can also have an impact on human consciousness. A mundane but remarkable example of this are for example electrical implants used in the treatment of various brain conditions. But there are some more potential examples that are of much more exotic nature. People have observed a link between electromagnetic phenomena and spiritual activity, and some regard various EM spectrum phenomena as the most physically tangible aspect of spirits. Perhaps then Lowell's metaphor was more right than the thought when it comes to spirit channeling – it's just that we are not always the ones creating the current. Perhaps the spirits he sought to banish have always simply lurked just out of reach, waiting for an opportunity to unfold into segments of reality tangible to us.
