Spring Equinox Letter – A Year of Practice & Anomalous Experiences - 20th of April 2025
The spring equinox is here. This marks the definite start of the light season and reawakening of the nature in the northern hemisphere. Winter was neither as restfull nor productive as I had hoped it to be. Current work culture has a bizarre tendency to try to accelerate during seasons when people are by the state of their surroundings at their lowest energy. While I could not devote as much attention to the Archive as I had hoped to, I'm still happy that I managed to make substantial updates and new content. I have a habit of overestimating my resources, and my Japanese studies have taken up much of my energy. I had to rein in my ambitions regarding them. ”I will study as much Japanese by summer” was a horribly ill-defined goal that led to bad habits and ultimately poor retention of information.
Setting all that aside, I started having anomalous experiences related to Touhou roughly a year ago. Sadly I did not keep a diary so it's very hard to say when exactly things started happening. Piecing together the clues, I ordered certain books which turned out to be relevant around the very beginning of February 2024. I remember that around the same time I had started using ”Keiki-sama would be unhappy if I do unhealthy things” as a kind of a motivational device. I had started experimenting with meditation and had a strange experience involving Chimata-sama which made me drop the practice for a while. I've written about all of this here.
Without too much looking back, what happened to me was a part of larger trend that happened in 2024. This somehow involved the Total Solar Eclipse of 8th of April 2024, and a strange vibe shift in 4chan's /jp/. 31st of March saw the ”Gensokyo Conspiracy X” thread. Roughly a week later there was both the eclipse and the announcement of Taboo Japan Disentanglement on April 9th. 20th of April saw another Gensokyo Conspiracy thread. From there on Taboo Japan Disentanglement was released on 3rd of May and the first Esoteric Touhou thread came to existence on 11th of May. Summer of 2024 saw fans gathering on the real Tanabata Hill on the Star Festival and intrusive pilgrimmages to the real-life Moriya Shrine. The Archive was born and the Esoteric Touhou threads started becoming something of a /jp/ cultural institution, popping up semi-regularly and routinely hitting bump limits. An expanding circle of people started reporting their anomalous experiences, leading to them becoming published on this site.
The start of 2025 saw release of the Shika no Kuni documentary, where the crew made a reconstruction of a Shinto ritual that had not been performed for over 600 years. I have written more about this before, and how it might tie up to the start of the anomalous events that led to the formation of the Archive and people associated with it coming together. There's not much to add to this at the moment, but it's noteworthy that the documentary has apparently been unexpectedly succesfull in Japan. An incredibly fascinating article details how the director apparently felt some kind of a power emanating from the ritual. The article also details how the writer, when watching the documetary, also felt some kind of a power and how the movie theater itself became like an extension of the ritual space. The writer compares the two deities called forth in the old Suwa rituals to the Polynesian idea of mana, an animating, driving force. I would also perhaps draw comparisons to the idea of kundalini, especially considering the serpentine connections...
The developments over the past year are also part of a larger trend re-enchantment of the world, which I wrote about in this article. While there remains much to untangle about the events that have led up to the present point, including the exact date when the reconstructed ritual for Shika no Kuni was performed and the exact astrological importance of the 8th of April 2024 eclipse, the Spring Equinoxe is a time of moving forward. There is much practice to be done, much new insights to be gained and I'm sure eventually the expanding circle will once again loop back to where this all began.
A noteworthy new thing in my life is that I recently took up on the formal worship of Eirin-sama and Suwako-sama along the four kami. I have felt their presence before, but after the summer of 2024, I very strongly realized that the point of spiritual practices is not the collect deities like they were some kind of Pokemon (or Sleepers in Artificial Dream in Arcadia, if we want to keep this metaphor in-franchise). This perhaps led me to avoiding answering the call for longer than was reasonable, but as far as I can tell, no harm done.
Before moving on towards the spring and summer and whatever they may bring, I want to spend this opportunity to reflect a bit on what has happened since this time last year and share a number of experiences that happened after the initial contact which I have described before. Before I move on to the particular experience, I would like to say that I think the biggest thing has been the kind of small, incremental changes that have come from consistent practice. I have engaged consistent (sadly not quite daily but getting closer and closer to it) meditation and dream journaling for about a year now, and I have been practicing Tai Chi for about six months now.
The overall impact on my well-being on all levels from this consistent practice has been really remarkable. It's hard to put it into words, but I guess a close aproximation is that once upon a time I felt as if I was tossed around by whatever emotions and whimsies came my way, and now I have found much more solid grounding. At the same time the world seems to have in a way ”opened up” and has become a considerably less miserable place to be. My ability to focus in things, anything, has notably improved. I used to have fairly bad computer-induced attention span difficulties, which have mostly resolved themselves. This has freed up so much time and energy for me.
Something about the meditation and Tai Chi have really profoundly changed me. It used to feel like every time I got some extra ”energy” (both in the biochemical and other sense) it just went into restlessness and anxiety. I had to stop drinking coffee at one point because I started getting only negative effects from drinking it. Recently, I had coffee for the first time in years and did not notice any adverse effects. I don't drink it daily, but I have drank it a couple of times after that. It really feels like I was sick in some hard to pin down way – maybe in a very metaphysical sense, maybe in a nervous disorder way, maybe something between these – and that I am now recovering from it.
Between all the unusual experiences, some of them very spectacular, have been days, weeks, of unassuming, modest, constant practice. Sometimes it has sucked. Sometimes meditating for 20 minutes has felt completely impossible. Sometimes I didn't want to go to the Tai Chi class or do the practice at home. There were days, at worst almost a whole straight week during the darkest of winter I didn't really do anything. But in the end, it has paid off. I think this is an extremely important point to make – the point of this not all isn't ”experiences”, which will no doubt come, but rather the kind of changes we can make into ourselves, the kind of qualities we build or cultivate.
With that out of the way, it's time to present the most notable further experiences since the summer of 2024. They are presented in a chronological order.
Underworld Journey in a Barber's Chair
This is one of the most bizarre experiences I have had so far and it's made me wonder about to what extent it's possible to induce these experiences with external stimuli. Somewhere around very late summer or very early autumn of 2024 I was getting a haircut. I always find this to be a very relaxing experience, but something very unusual happened this time.
The monotone buzzing of the electric razor lulls me into some kind of light trance state. I start getting visions of Keiki-sama. She leads me to some kind of an underworld realm that is on first glance very much like how the Animal Hell is depicted in Touhou. It's full of skyscrapers, a dystopian cityscape surrounded by a sea of flames on all sides. But as we move through the empty streets, the city starts to shrink in size. Soon enough it becomes nothing but a miniature set, me and Keiki-sama towering over it. The sea of flames has become a static, fake setpiece surrounding this weird minature scene. Keiki-sama sweeps down the buildings and reveals the fake flames to be nothing but pain on black canvas the covers a strange polygonal space. She pulls the canvas down and the walls are revealed to be a mirror surface.
An opening has appeared on one of the walls and she leads me down there. It leads to hallway where menacing looking entities lurk in wait. But they do nothing but stand in place. The first one in row is wicked looking Yukari-sama. Keiki-sama taps her with one of her tools and it turns out to be nothing but a flat cutout that falls down, revealing a hovering ball of light behind it. We move to another entity, a substantially larger and more aggressive looking demonic entity. Keiki-sama taps it too and it too is revealed to be but a flat cutout hiding an orb of light. A third entity, a more abstract kind of menace goes through the same fate.
We arrive at the end of the tunnel. There's a very large mirror there in which I can see myself and Keiki-sama. She asks me ”do I even need to show you what's inside of you?”. Anxiety starts building up inside of me. Likely sensing my hesitancy, instead of revealing me too to be nothing but a flat cutout with an orb of light hiding behind it, she grabs her own headgear and starts pulling. What happens next is hard to describe. Imagine that her outer layer was nothing but thin fabric covering something else, and that she could pull that off of herself like you could pull a bedsheet you put over yourself. I snap out of the vision before she can reveal herself to inevitably be nothing but an orb of light too.
A Cure for Low Self-Esteem
Later in the Fall I commit the ritual that Keiki-sama had instructed me to do already in the summer. I had told her that I was not ready to do it at that moment. She had told me that she'd wait ”for hundred years, but unfortunately my current biological lifespan would expire before that”. I took this as a good sign, and she had to wait only for a few months.
I will not describe the specifics here, but it involved doing something that mirrors her particular talents, invoking her powers and a site in the city that I had identified carrying similar energies that she does and a full moon. The goal of the ritual was to ride me of unearned low self-esteem. By this I mean low-self esteem caused by things that are not moral violations. Rather than destroying them, it was about returning them to the cycle, the find new hosts, so that someone who should feel bad about themself would feel so.
The ritual felt incredibly charged already as I performed it. The effects were harder and starker than I had expected. What resulted was a two-week long destabilization of my personality. I had mood swings, intense visions, bouts of very strong sexual desire, flashes of mania. I felt unburdened, untethered and indeed very much freed of whatever had cause me to view myself in such a self-deprecating light. I went through physical symptoms too. My hands and feet but only my hands and feet would itch after taking a shower. At some point I felt for several days like I had a lump in my throat.
Eventually things settled down and I found myself freed from what I wanted to be freed of, but back on a more grounded footing. I no longer had weird itching or a lump in my throat either. This was very instructive on how powerful rituals can be, and I have not felt the need to do anything of this type or scale ever since.
Astral Objects
This is less of a singular event and more a series of events that happened between the summer of 2024 and the end of the year. There have been three instances where the kami have given me what I can only call some kind of astral tools. These are not literal objects, but rather items that are easily and readily able to be visualized. I will not go into details over what they are or what they do, but two of them were given to solve particular problems I was facing at the moment. The third one was given as a powerful symbolic reminder. If it has some kind of a practical value, I have not been able to determine it yet, though there are instances where it has appeared without me calling out for it.
There's also a fourth astral object that was given to me by a spirit that is not one of the deities I revere, but is also from Gensokyo. I have not been able to discern it's use or exact meaning yet, but I think it might have been a kind of a present carrying symbolic value that I somehow earned by 1CC'ing her game and showing her the respect she earns when she afterwards popped into my evening meditation.
Divine Fever Dreams
In October 2024 I was very sick with a nasty flu type infection for a while. During that time I experienced some extraordinary visionary states. During the first night of being sick, as I was trying to sleep I was struck by visions of Chinese type-dragons, including one where I was riding one through the skies. This was soon replaced by a vision of Kanako-sama aproaching me from darkness where I could only see my body.. She looked unbelievably powerful, her hair, clothing and the hoop of shimenawa were solid light against darkness that made up the rest of the vision and her flesh. She floats around what would have been the foot of my bed if this had played out in the physical world, and then moves closer. I start to feel a sensation of warmth building up in my feet. The sensation begins to travel upwards and she floats closer and closer to me, hitting first my crotch, then seeping ever upwards along my spine.
When this warmth hits my head I break out with a fever and the vision becomes extremely intensive. She glows with numinous power and the shimenawa begins to unravel into thousands of tiny threads of light which rotate around. She begins receding away from me, the intense halo of light turning into a some kind of a portal through which she vanishes. Before she goes, she tells me ”I could have done more for you if you had more of your own energy left”.
On the second night I receive another visitor. At this point it's an unexpected one: Eirin Yagokoro-sama. As I struggle to sleep, I receive a vision of her descending from the skies towards me. She hands me a tiny cup which I accept. I will to drink it and I can actually taste it for real. It tastes somewhere between regular cough medicine and what I remember Jagermeister tasting like. The vision of her vanishes, and something remarkable happens. I feel an electric tingle overtake my whole body, and with my eyes closed, it's as if I can see the veins inside my body, filled with golden light.
Eventually this vision gives way to another. I'm lying on a futon in a traditional Japanese room. There's a stove with fire burning in it, and I can see the full moon and a forest from a window. Eirin-sama is there, as is a rabbit-eared attendant. I ask them where I am and Eirin-sama says "you can think of it like a senkai" and encourages me to rest.
For an indeterminate long while I just lie down there, perceiving my surroundings. At some point the vision of the room is replaced by a vision of Eirin-sama ascending to the skies, her silhouette merging with the Moon and vanishing. But the vision of the room persists after that. At some point I open up my eyes and go to the toilet. When I go back to the bed and close my eyes it's like I'm right back in that room. After another indeterminate, but quite long feeling while, I hear "you should take human medicine now". I do as is told. As I get back to bed, I can still perceive the room when I close my eyes untill I fall asleep at some point.
Few days later I make an offering to thank Eirin-sama. I perceive her presence quite strongly again, and receive a vision of her blowing at her palm. Her breath turns into a vibrant blue butterfly that flies toward me, circles my head once and vanishes. Of some interest about this encounter might be that someone I had been in contact with had prayed for my health while I was sick, and I learned of this only after it had happened. The figure they prayed to was the Medicine Buddha, and Eirin-sama shares a tittle with him in Touhou canon.
Hexagram 30
This is a series of events that does not involve the kami directly, but rather it centers around the I Ching. I bought a copy of Benebell Wen's I Ching: The Oracle around mid-November 2024. The day after placing the order I saw a man in a train who has an I Ching hexagram on his jacket. I take note of it, and it turns out to be Hexagram 30. I don't initially think of much of this, noting it simply as an interesting curious synchronicity. However, when the I Ching arrives, I realize that the hexagram depicted on the cover is the same as in the man's jacket!
I've put the I Ching into good use, and beyond generating the hexagrams on purpose, I've since seen them appear in other contexts on their own. These have included meditation sessions, prayers, dreams and visionary states. Following the advice of these hexagrams - both when cast and when manifested on their own, has been a very wise course of action. There's however one particular instance of the "self-manifesting" hexagrams that still remains rather mysterious to me, which I will detail next.
The Cauldron
The time between December of 2024 and end of January 2025 was extremely frustrating, tiresome and unproductive. Among other largely unsuccesful ventures were my attempts at 1CC'ing Ten Desire on Normal. I find that I enjoy more and do better at Touhou games if I play them during an aproriate season. For Ten Desires, the damp, dark failure of a winter was more than fitting.
Constantly revisiting the same netherworld, graveyeards and catacombs felt like the perfect mirror of trying to manage my work-life balance in very adversarial conditions during the darkest time of the year. It was frustrating. There spans of multiple days that I did not play the game because I was too tired to do so after work, spiritual practice and Japanese studies.
Eventually I however manage to eke out a Normal 1CC on the game. I had been attempting it since November 2024. Clearing these games on Normal is always extremely cathartic for me (higher difficulties being beyond me at the moment), but this was something extraordinary. I burst into tears. I feel an enormous surge of energy and I have to go lie down. My entire body feels hot and tingly and I'm overtaken by a narcotic sensation reminescent of the medication I received after a surgery I had to undergo.
I start to see a vision of Toyosatomimi no Miko, emerging from a swirling vortex of brilliant orbs of light. She's made out of pure golden light and she stands in the middle of an ever-shifting storm of energy that pulsates in expanding and contracting patterns. She says that she ”really means it”, presumably refering to the dialogue during Reimu's ending of the game. She tells me the struggle was worth it and that the insight gained was valid.
This particular insight requires some explanation. Since the autumn of 2024, I have been practicing Tai Chi alongside with my other practices and spiritual studies. At some point I started seeing stronger and stronger parallels between the movements in Tai Chi and broader Taoist ideas. The constant back and forth is obviously based on the ideas of yin and yang, and this was explicitly told to us during a lesson about a month after this incident. There's also something about how the form that is performed is kind of an expanding circle that is linked to Taoist ideas about life, universe and time being an expanding circle.
While desperately playing Ten Desires, I had started perceiving these same kind of back and forth, expanding circle qualities in many of the patterns. You reach closer to the enemy, and then back away, and many of the patterns have very circular character. Whether this was by deliberate human design or divine inspiration, only ZUN if even himself knows. I think it's the perception of different things possessing yin-yang and spiral-like qualities that is the insight she refered to.
At some point Toyosatomimi-sama shows me an I Ching hexagram. She does this by conjuring forth and orb which she holds in her palms, one above, one below. In the middle of the orb, a dark circle against her light, shines the hexagram. I get out of the bed and hastily scribble it down and take a quick look at the reference table of Wen's I Ching. It's hexagram 50, The Cauldron.
This experience was rather remarkable for many reasons. It was unusually long-lasting. Only after about 40 to 45 minutes I started feeling normal enough to resume my daily activities, even though the visions subsided perhaps after 20 minutes or so. The visitor was unexpected, as I had not, and still don't, worship Toyosatomimi no Miko-sama. It does make perfect sense though. There is a previous report of someone having a powerful spiritual experience while playing Mountain of Faith. The various spellcards are essentially mandalas. Exposing yourself to them is going to leave a mark.
Now, Toyosatomimi no Miko-sama being a spirit that is capable of reaching through is extremely interesting in itself though. Ten Desires itself has some rather interesting ideas about her identity. In Sanae's ending, it's essentially stated that Toyosatomimi-sama is not the historical prince Shotoku, but rather his legend, reborn. This makes the question of what exactly this Toyosatomimi no Miko-sama that can reach out through Tohou then is?
It needs to be stated that there is, or was, religious devotion around Prince Shotoku after his death. He essentially became deified and revered for his civilizational efforts, promotion of Buddhism and protection of Japan and the Imperial Family. Very important religious figures like Saicho (founder of Tendai Buddhism) and Shinran (founder of Jodo Shinshu) stated that they received inspiration from and visions of Prince Shotoku. What exactly is this Prince Shotoku that reached out to them? Did he truly become a divine entity after passing from his incarnate form? Do the same divine forces that worked through him now work through his apperance? Is he an egregore or some kind of ”spirit of enlightened aristocracy”? Is the Toyosatomimi no Miko the same spirit, some kind of offspring or successor, and if so, why would she choose to be portrayed as she is?
At the moment I have more questions than answers, regarding both her nature and what exactly she meant with The Cauldron.
First Iteration
There was a very powerful experience related to me taking up the formal worship of Eirin-sama and Suwako-sama. Doing so involved crafting substitute ofuda dedicated to them, as well as coming up prayers for them. I felt highly emotional already when making these preparations. As I started the ritual, I felt a very strong charge. I sometimes get this tinnitus-type of noise when I medidate, and the same happened when I started to call out for Eirin-sama and Suwako-sama. I had difficulty reciting the prayer because the power was so palpable. I manage to finish the prayer, but not without tearing up a bit.
After conducting the prayer, I meditate and wait for an answer. I don't have to wait for long. First comes Suwako-sama. In the vision, she smiles at me and hands me a charm of sorts. She doesn't say anything, but I get this extremely strong sense of ”took you long enough”. Next arrives Eirin-sama, descending from the skies. She grabs my hand and we rise upwards, all the way to the Moon.
We stand on the Moon. Eirin-sama tells me that she has been waiting for this. What she told me next has been very difficult to integrate and I still don't really know what to make of it. She tells me that my ”first iteration” was not born on Earth. She tells me that I must have taken a strong liking to the ”mudball”. I tell her that yes, I love the Earth, even though it's sometimes very hard. She says ”maybe there is something to how there is no lotus without the mud”.
After that, for a moment, we are just there, on the Moon. Then it all vanishes and I sink into some unprecedentedly deep level of meditative absorbtion. This state is soon enough replaced by another vision. Okina-sama appears, looking delighted. She tells me that she's happy to see that I am ”no longer afraid of my origins” but that I am not ready and that I should go back. I open my eyes and snap out of it.
I don't think words can do justice to the sheer power and clarity of the experience. I don't really know what to make of it all either, and I don't really want to get too caught up in any kind of speculations about potential cosmic origin. I believe in reincarnation and ”I” have obviously been great many things since ”I” started to exist, whatever exactly that means. But I don't think it's good to get too swept up in speculations about some far-flung stellar origin. There is much to be done right here, right now.
What's next for the Archive?
That much to be done also includes the Archive, so I'll just wrap up things by talking about some future updates. I recently published the first part of a two-part series of articles intended to take look into what other's have written about the more mythological, spiritual side of Touhou. In that article I took a look in the West, and up next is Japan. More folkloric looks into Touhou, as well as a tradition of visiting places associated with Touhou, are as expected, much, much more common there. However, some Japanese cultural and linguistic peculiarities make it difficult to discern what exactly is the type of interest they show towards this side of Touhou.
Beyond that, there are few other updates of varying levels of maturity planned. These include a closer look into the Suwa mythology, and attempts at charting out just what exactly some of the more prominent yet mysterious spirits of Gensokyo are. There are also few things about Nagano I have discovered that should get added to Gensokyo Is A Place on Earth? There's also all kinds of scattered bits and pieces that'd go into their own sections. For example, it appears that there have been Japanese writers, or at least one, operating around the ultraterrestrial hypothesis. Whether this was influence from West or something they discovered on their own is a question I don't have an answer for yet.
Beyond that, I have some preliminary ideas for a section about Divination and Energy Work for Starting the Practice mode. I don't feel quite yet confident or competent enough to do a full writeup of either, and with the latter, beyond the most simple basics, in-person teaching and guidance is needed. Still, I think it would be good to get something there by the end of the year at least and then move on to whatever part 5 will be. Perhaps it will be a more analytic, collated look at the various notable spirits of Gensokyo and how to interact with them. Perhaps it will be about what I feel have been so far the core lessons learned. Both will take time to mature. The more I spend doing these things, the more I understand it's better to go slow.
Best regards
-Emissary
