Occult Japan; or, The Way of the Gods

About this book

At a Japanese shrine, worshippers may call on a god whose presence is felt through a human medium. Percival Lowell was particularly interested in this experience of possession and in the practices surrounding Shinto devotion.

His account follows ceremonies, religious specialists and the place of unseen beings in everyday life. Lowell writes as an American observer in the nineteenth century, and his explanations often reveal as much about his own assumptions as the people he describes. The firsthand scenes are worth reading closely, especially where living ritual confounds his efforts to fit it into a tidy theory.