Winter Solstice Letter 2025 – A Midwinter Reflection – 21st of December 2025

A whole year has passed since the last Winter solstice letter. I went back and read it and found it kinda funny how I was doing exactly the same things as I have been doing recently. A year ago I was toiling on an update to the Taoism section and was wondering about what kind of a format the Archive should have. Now I have recently finished a much more substantial update to the Taoism section, and I am once again wondering about what kind of a format the Archive should have. I didn’t think time would be this circular…

Jokes aside, this winter hasn’t been easy for me. The first version of this text was essentially a long vent, but I ended up deleting it. It felt like it was good to pour out those thoughts, but ultimately much of them were simply exhaustion. Since returning from Japan, I have written more text for the Archive than I wrote for my Master’s Thesis. The early winter was extceptionally busy at work. It’s funny how when you become more able to stand on your own, people will want to saddle you up with all kinds of extra responsibilities. I haven’t exactly been handling the work-life balance well lately, and sometimes working on the Archive has felt like a second job. It’s not all bad, for example I found writing the Parade and Pandemonium and Touhou as Youkai Culture quite effortless and enjoyable. The Taoism update however felt like pulling teeth at times. Part of it was it’s scope, and it felt like everything I researched pulled me into ten different directions at once. Part of it was simply me not being able to tell myself that this thing can wait for later. But part of it was something else.

This something else is developing a more mature, critical view of the various Japanese and Chinese spiritual traditions that I have studied. The more I have read of them, the more they sit into a context, and often this context reveals internal tensions and contradictions. The beautiful, harmonious narratives that people like to represent vanish into thin air. Things that seemed ancient turn out to be less than hundred years old. That isn’t to say I have become completely disillusioned either or that I don’t see the value. Peeling open the narratives revealed a very complicated reality that was at times exhausting to deal with. I found myself at times seriously asking myself why am I doing this and if it’s worth the time and effort. Depending on the point of view, this was either exactly the wrong or right time to work on something like this, the smothering winter dark that dissolves any extra ambitions coupled with the research process that dissolved beautiful narratives into confusion, chaos and uncertainty.

I also found myself at times strongly questioning the choices of framing I had done. This whole project would have very likely looked different if Foster’s Pandemonium and Parade had been the first thing I read. On the other hand I found it delightful how much it seemed to answer my questions, and on the other hand I was deeply annoyed because of how much it recontextualized this project. Suddenly there was no need to speculate about ZUN possibly being influenced by some Western occult ideas, when the Japanese had natively developed something extremely similar, within the very tradition of studying youkai. This made me feel quite foolish. Why had I dismissed youkai? Part of it was my preconceived notion of them being ”just monsters”. The other half was some kind of fear of digging too deep into them, as ridiculous that sounds.

A lot of my ideas about the numinous have changed since I started this, and it feels like I have more questions than answers. Things have become somewhat demystified, as digging into these things inevitably has that kind of an effect. I’m no longer really scared of the numinous – not that there aren’t potentially troublesome things out there. I’m not quite sure anymore on the internality vs externality of these things, how much the numinous has a definite form and how much it needs us to give it a form. I have wondered what exactly is my desire to get involved with this and where to go next. I’ve honestly been too tired to deal with these questions in a coherent manner lately, but I think it’s OK. I think it’s okay that for once in my life I give myself the permission to feel kinda shit for couple of months during the worst time of the year. It’s not like things have been unbearably bad either. Things come and go in waves, there are ups and downs.

I’ve been kinda slacking with practice lately, and part of this is because of trying to juggle my work, writing for the Archive and taking care of myself. The other half of it is that the later half of Autumn was incredible intense, and at times disorienting time when it came to spiritual experiences. I have become much less interested in talking about my own experiences, because I feel it makes things very self-centered and kind of smothers the case that I am trying to make through research. But the experiences were so strong, difficult and disorienting that I started questioning if I want to send others down this path. So few people are really ready for the full ramifications of these things, and there’s so much potential to get stuck in all kinds of uncanny borderlands. At the same time I do believe there is a purpose to it all, I’ve just temporarily lost sight of it.

At the same time I have been trying to make the Archive to be of better quality. The first draft was written in two weeks in a state of (charitably) divine inspiration or (uncharitably) mania. It was based on half-remembered sources, vibes and things that I honestly don’t know where they came from. The whole spirit ecology thing in particular is a mystery to me. It was a very happy time for me, I was basicaly in a nonstop flow state. But the end result wasn’t very great. As my understanding of Japanese ideas has grown, I have found there is less and less need to refer things from the Western side of things. They are extremely unlikely to have influenced ZUN’s worldbuilding. That is, of course, as much as it is his project, considering how he keeps saying he doesn’t know what characters are doing, that they choose when they want to appear, and that he goes into a trance when working on art and music.

This is maybe straying a bit to the vent territory, and that’s not really the purpose. The purpose is to contextualize something I was struggling with last year too. That is, what should be the format of the Archive. A lot of the current content beyond the first section is really not up to my standards anymore and I feel like it ultimately has very little to do with ZUN’s actual inspirations and are not necessarily best models for explaining the ”Esoteric in Touhou”. I’m pretty sure I have written this exact same thing in one of the seasonal updates, but it felt like I emptied a whole magazine trying to shoot for the target and kinda hit around it. I do find it extremely interesting how the Japanese were coming up with ideas about the relationship between reality (or our understanding of it), language and narratives that West apparently caught up to only much later. There certainly is convergence between these ideas. Some Western occult ideas and lore about things like UFOs and cryptids has undoubtedly been disseminated into Japan. But how much knowledge about this process is documented in English, or even Japanese, is a big question.

I feel like on some level I am hitting the limits of my investigative abilities without becoming fluent in Japanese and possibly even Chinese. Learning Japanese has been a much slower project than I had hoped for, and how complicated things have been lately, I haven’t had all that much energy to give to that project either. Learning Chinese is a complete pie in the sky. But rather than slumping into despair over this, I have simply decided to acknowledge that for now my understanding of things will have limits. As such, it’s possible that this project will hit a point where I will not be able to find new, relevant information without someone very fluent in either language getting involved. That might or might not happen, but I can’t count on it.

What I am getting at is that I think it would be the best if I did a major rehaul of the Archive. This project has always been strongly shaped by my own experiences and previous information I have had. I strayed from any kind of neutral documentation and analysis of the Esoteric Touhou threads content extremely fast. Lying at the heart of this all has been the (admitedly selfish) desire to ”write a book”, something I have been wanting to do in various forms for like two decades now. It might be best to just shamelessly embrace it, and write out what I actually know, what has been researched, and what is most likely and the most relevant into a book format. It would essentially cover the current contents of the first part of The Esoteric in Touhou, with slight updates to the Buddhism section and bit of expansion to the Shinto section, which has become kinda short compared to the other two. It could very much use a bit of history regarding how Shinto as we know it came to be, the history of miko, and a brief exploration of relevant lore known of Gensokyo’s two Shinto/”Shinto” institutions, the Hakurei and Moriya shrines. Beyond these three, I would add a section about youkai lore, a section which has been sitting in my head as ”Syncretism, Shamanism and ??????” and maybe a section that would be a kind of timeline of Touhou-relevant Japanese mythmaking from Kojiki to ZUN. To cap it off there would be a final synthesis and analysis on the kind of repeated themes which can be found through all these traditions and ideas.

These ideas are things like the intertwining of the spiritual and material and the immanent and transcendent, the power of language, perception and narratives, the microcosmic-macrocosmic nature of reality, the energetic processes that make up the universe and how they are patterned, cyclicality and mythical time as well as the power and potential of liminality, how things become other things, and how actions have long-term consequences, building up like little streams merging into a river. Touhou as presented by ZUN’s narratives does not deal with all of these themes particularly in depth, but it does deal with certain themes, particularly those related to power of belief and narratives and liminality in very interesting ways. And what is not explicit is implicit, ready to those willing to walk the path back to the source.

This kind of structure building on Part 1 would mean culling much content. There’s a lot of crap in the later sections, but it’s not all bad. I think fringe science and ”okaruto”, the ”occult” in Japanese sense of all kinds of weird mysterious, magical, strange that is not necessarily of native origin and their connection to Hifuu Club and certain later Touhou lore are relevant and could be worked on. Analyzing the convergence of some Japanese ideas and Western occult ideas would be interesting. It would also be interesting to know to what extent and how Western occult ideas influenced Japan from the 1980s ”occult boom” onwards. But this would be a really massive undertaking and finding information about some of these topics would likely require fluency in Japanese, and even then probably digging into extremely obscure content. I feel like writing the history of Western occult influence on Japan is more of a job for someone getting paid by some Department of East Asian Studies, not some guy doing this as a hobby. It would feel bad to leave these sections as some undeveloped vestigal remnant, but not all of it deserves the axe either. I’m at this moment unsure what to do with these.

The point of all this is that I need a more clear long-term plan which would allow me to call the project at least partially complete at some point, hopefully within the next 6-12 months. It’s not that I want to stop writing for the Archive, even less that I want to end this project and end all the relationships built along the way, but it’s that I need to fullfill that desire to ”write a book”. I need to present the information found in a coherent, insightful manner, and I want it to be of good quality. I don’t feel the need to opine or speculate anymore so much, and there is no need to bend Western ideas I was most familiar with out of shape to ”explain” Touhou when it’s clearly part of long-term Japanese cultural trends dealing with the mysterious and liminal. There are some extremely, deeply interesting and powerful ideas that are connected to the long cultural lineages from which Touhou emerged, and by unspooling them you will be able to find them too. And much like I have, you might start to find the ”troublesome ones who move on their own”.

I have of course changed my mind many times in the past, but this is the current plan for the moment. Even if it does not manifest in this exact form, it’s good to have something that would provide more direction. Having a plan allows for planning, and hopefully for more balanced distribution of work, practice, writing and actual leisure. As much as I love writing, there are also other things I would like to do. Having a completion point or at least some kind of midway tally point would allow me to do other things if necessary from that point on. Those might very well be related to the Archive’s topics. I have wanted to do videos, music, games...many different things, but the writing and re-writing has kept me very, very occupied.

This winter has been a time of kind of dissolutive part of the process, a time of being critical towards myself and others, a time of reassesment and a time where at times I’ve honestly had barely any energy for doing anything else than the bare minimum. But I ultimately recognize that this too is part of life, and there is almost something nice about allowing myself to feel kinda shit for change, allowing myself to hit my limits and allowing myself to let go off things and viewpoints which are no longer working out or relevant. You can’t make new things without letting go of old ones. I feel like the worst is behind me now, and as we start to head towards spring, I am sure I will find more energy to take this project to the direction where I want it to go to.

This site recently broke 100k views, which even including all the scrapers and bots, is kind of an unfathomably large number. I never expected to even hit 10k and have not done this for pumping up a number. But breaking the magical 100k limit just before the solstice does feel a bit pointed. I’m grateful for everyone who has shown interest towards this project, and I hope to present sooner than later the best possible version of it to you all.

Best regards
-Emissary