どうしてる？ Today we will be discussing the meaning of the term Shinto and its origin.

I am sure that many of our readers may have researched various theories concerning the origin of the Shinto religion, or to be more precise the Shinto cosmogony. Personally, I have read many erroneous theories concerning of when Shinto originated. Some even claim that its inception started around 500 B.C. These theories are very contradictory. Since Shinto has no founder or scriptural canon, then a precise date of its origin cannot be determined. Shinto incorporates practices and rituals of the indigenous people of the Japanese pre-historic period, such as shamanism and the reverential understanding of nature, sometimes referred to as nature worship. Out of The Jungle (6^th edition) by Bill Dunbar, state the following on pages 92-93:

“The origin of Shinto comes from the time when it was not recognized as a religion and didn’t have some of the attributes that we usually ascribe to a religion,…It was more like a folk culture, with nature and ancestor worship, with a great number of deities who were in control of the forces of nature.”

Shinto is not a religion, but a cosmogony based on scientific laws that preceded the creation of this universe.  Michael Bertiaux makes the following observation on page 410, in the Voudon Gnostic Workbook:

“This Shinto religion has been found to be uniquely suitable for the development into a magickal physics because of its natural and ideal structure, which hidden behing popular myths and fables reveals to us the physics of a mystical race from beyond our solar system, the Kami, or Beings of Light, who made our solar system….Shinto energies are the basic contents and sophiological wholes (“wisdom-energy powers”) of the Lemurian Current, while Vudu energies are the basic contents and wisdom-energy fields of the Atlantean Current.”

The subject of Lemuria’s existence in pre-Atlantean times is a very controversial subject, which is pursued more by the occultist than the modern scientist. This does not mean that Bertiaux’s observations are invalid, especially since modern science is not based on facts, but the logical process of identification made by the conscious mind, and does not recognize or make any attempts to understand the process of the subconscious, or primordial mind.. We find this to be the case, even when we observe many of the definitions given to the term “Shinto.”

Many people have given the simple definition of the term Shinto as meaning the “Way of the Gods,” However, this definition seems to resonate only with those who are engaged to the logical process of understanding spirituality. First, we must consider the fact that the term “Shinto” was not used by the Ancient Japanese people from remote times to describe their spiritual practices. The Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, Voumne 3, by Shepard Krech, states the following on page 1111:

“Many scholars now believe that Japanese actually borrowed the word “Shinto” from an eighth-century Chinese word for Taoism…In the eighth century, the Yamato state that Taoist priests travel to Japan from China, and in time the entire Japanese conception of empire and even the cult of emperors themselves took on a Taoist flavor. Nonetheless, early Japanese probably did not identify, isolate, and categorize Shinto as their “religion.”  Rather, for a people who lived close to nature on a wild and mountainous archipelago, Shinto probably constituted everything they knew and sought to know about the natural world.”

What I find interesting about all of this is that it seems highly unlikely that a group, or a person would identify a different set of spiritual practices as being the same, if they were indeed different. For example, when the representatives from the Catholic Church came to America, they did not recognize the practices of the Native American as similar to their own. So then, why is it that the spiritual practices of the Ancient Japanese people was recognized by Taoist priests as the Tao? I am sure that one reason for this concerns itself with Taoist shamanistic origins as well. It seems that Shinto and Taoism emerge from the same root, and the Taoists could recognize the practices as their own, coupled with the purity in which the indigenous Japanese population had faithfully preserved. The term Shinto is derived form the written Chinese 神道. It is composed of two kanji, “shin” meaning divine, gods, or spirits, known as Kami, and “to” meaning path of study, the way, a derivative of the Chinese term tao. Therefore, the term Shinto is define as the “Way of the Kami.” Interestingly, the term Kami is also composed of two kanji, ka meaning fire and mi meaning water. In Taoist thought water is symbolic of the yin and fire the symbol for yang. Here we find that the term Shinto is more properly translated the Way of Fire and Water, or the Way of Yin and Yang.

Another “logical” misconception made by modern scholars, is that the term Kami and its meaning are difficult to understand. Maybe this is true for those who are foreign to Japanese culture and spirituality. The Kami represent the measurement ka (fire, kundalini-energy) in relation to the surrounding and subtle mi (water, subtle ki, or life-force energies.) The ratio of ka to mi is used in Shinto cosmogony to determine the influence that an emanating force has on its environment. We will discuss various aspects of the Kami in a future article.

良い一日を。