The Angry Death and the blind shamans of Japan

INTRODUCTION

In the Nord-est of Japan can still be found the last rapresentative of a peculiar shamanism; the shamanism of the itako イタコ, the blind female shamans. The activity of these women does not exhaust the landscape of Japanese shamanism, but they undoubtely represent a peculiarity of the place; blind since birth, or from a very young age, they “choose” the shamanic as a consequence of this phisical disability. The itako can be considered as the last heiresses of a shamanism which has his own roots in the myth. We have to consider Edwards’ researches (who links the image of the shamaness to the prototype of Himiko, the legendary emperess of Yamatai); or Miller’s works on the analysis of chinise-originated rites connected to itako initiation rites; or Yanagita Kunio and his analysis of shamanic experience. In all these works, there is a clear tendency to draw the japanese shamanism physiognomy as essentially feminine. The Itakos have often been the target of differents controversies and debates among anthropologist and religious specialists, who questioned the authenticity of their shamanic experience, and even the possibility to include it in the field of Shamanism. Nevertheless, taking a wider look at the phenomeno, not only the itako follows (reflects) the traditional image suggested by Eliade, but, more precisely, her role, her path, her whole experience allow us to put them in the shamanistic phenomenon.

The itakos face a long period of physical and spiritual training that culminates in the initiation ceremony, where the apprentice simbolically dies in order to gain a new life as a religious specialist. Refusing to give their experience, and their symbolic activity, the qualification of “shamanic” (on the only basis of the lack of some elements), could be considered therefore unjustified.

What is exactly the activity of these japanese blind shamans? Shamanism, as Mircea Eliade suggest, is a technique of the extasis, aiming to create a link between our world and the other, amd the shaman is the only person who capable of travel between the two place in order to ensure communication. But the shamanism is, above all usually it is a vocation, a very complex contract established with the supernatural.

The itakos perfectly fit this general pattern, but their activities have a particular functional focus: their specialty resides in the preferential communication with the dead, and in particular with the ones I will call “angry ghosts”; these latters are the exiled souls who can’t find peace, barred from the ancestors’ society, and who represent a threat for the living. The main important duty for the itako is to allow the angry ghosts to communicate with their living relatives in order to have their needs satisfied, and their anguish eased.

PROBLEMATICS

This liminal role, peculiar to the itakos, inevitably raise one first question: why the task to enter this dangerous border region is assigned exclusively to the itako? And why their activity can not be accomplished by other experts of the symbolic pratices, or by the priests of the official and institutional cults? The notion of impurity We can find a first solution to the previous questions in a very archaic category of the japanese religious thought, the concept of kegare, which is usually translated with “impurity”.

As Mary Douglas pointed out in her work “Purity and Danger”, the idea of pollution in a central in almost all the religious systems, and it goes beyond the ritual interdicts about health precautions and hygiene. In the Shinto tradition, the boundary between purity and impurity is extremely important, and it provides the ground for the delimitation of space, places, moments devoted to the Sacred, and other related to the Profane.

The ritual impurity is what really impedes the communications with the Gods, because it offends and repels them; it is what make the earth dirty and polluted in turn. Death is the source of a extremely powerful pollution, which requires particular attentions, and purification rituals of a certain importance.

Also the Buddhism, in particular in its Japanese declinations, puts a strong accent on the dangers of the pollutions from differents sources of impurity; it often results in very strict training periods to purify the body and the spirit. The impurity of death and the dead Here we come to the first of the two elements of the problem. Death is polluted and impure for its own nature, and the dead, in particular the angry dead, are dangerous not only as the climax of impurity, but mainly because they threat to bring about new deaths and new pollutions in the society of the living. Violating all the organized classifications between the two worlds, the angry dead lives open the boundary between worlds that should never come into contact, because if the delimitations vanish, the caos reappear.

The dead must be kept apart from the living society, in order to preserve the boundaries between the two realities. The impurity of women The second element is the following: not only death is impure but, in the same way, the woman too is a extremely strong source of pollution. In the japanese religious context, woman is impure: she represent tha nature in its savage condition, dangerous, defined by the absolute caos and the absence of control. Menstruations, pregnancy, childbearing and birth are all strongly polluted, and the woman, which is biologically related to procreation, is naturally doomed to impurity.

This vision is encouraged by the Buddhism, for which the women won’t never be able to rich enlightenment, and are condamned, after death, to suffer the torments of the Hells as a punishment to have polluted the earth with menstrual and delivery blood.

The ideal of woman as a symbol of fertility and life itself, usual for European and American people, is here overturned; women are the breaking violence of negative forces in the ordined masculine world, and fertility comes exclusively from the control that man exercises on her. It is not an accident if the deity of the mountains (Yama no kami) is feminine, while the deity of ricefields and organized spaces (Ta no kami) is a male deity. When the Buddhism grew his power on the places of worship, the monks estabished the nyonin kekka, sort of sacred perimeter inside which women, and shamanesses in particular, were not allow the walk.

This brings to a particular situation in which the buddhist monks, inside the mountain temples, represent the institutional religious powers (the only one actually recognized), and the female shamans of the ancient cults (representing a second source of power) are “external”, outside the sacred circle, and extremely dangerous. Impurity and social structure: order and chaos Now we can offer a better answer to the initial question: only the itako can come to contact with the angry ghosts because she share their same impurity.

If a man ventures in that world, he will invariably get polluted. Moreover, the itakos live on the fringes of society: their activity is accepted by tacit agree, also sought for, but at one condition: they have to stay in this gray zone, outside the official practices and cults. Placed outcast from the birth (because of their physical disability), they maintain this status as a consequence of the path they chose. They are necessary to the society because they take charge an activity that no one else would practice; nevertheless they are condamned to the social and onthololgical fringes.

We can give the same status to the angry ghost; it is an errand being, precariously in balance between two places, the world of the living and the world of the deads, without belonging to either of them. It can not come back, refused from the living society, nor move on, in the ancestors society.

We can now better see why only someone who share the same characteristic with it, can actually start a communication. We can say, hence, that the itakos represent a different source of power, alterative to the institutional and prevailing cults. But their status is extremely ambiguous: rejected from the society in order to avoid the breaking of the order, the itakos receive, from this same society, the request to manage a violent power such as that of the angry ghosts, which otherwise could mine the existing order and bring chaos to the livings.

ANALYSIS OF THE MAIN ELEMENTS

In order to evaluate the ideas presented above, it will be necessary to analyse the different elements that compose the issue, from the japanese religious background, to the conceptions of the death, to a coherent image of the angry ghosts and the shamans, in the different religious systems. It will also be important to analyse the itako experience, from the beginning as an apprentice till their initiation, and their everyday practice and actual partecipation the the social system.

Religious background In order to understand the itako experience, we have to carefully consider the religious background in which their activity takes place. In terms of practices and beliefs (the latter is a cathegory with a very limited pregnancy among the japanese), Japan is not a monolithic reality, but a complex interwining of different traditions and influences; simplifing, we can find a substratum (contestable notion, used here only as a literary device) of local cults, upon which, in the VI century, the Buddhism overlapped, (in its different forms and schools) interacting with them.

At first religion of the ruling classes, the Buddhism then gains all the different levels of the population, becoming a very important element in the everyday religious practice. In this background we can also find other elements, all from a continental origin, from the confucian ethic, to taoist elements and tantric esotheric practices. Death and dying conceptions in the Japanese tradition The awareness of death as the final destiny is a feeling the bind together the whole Mankind.

Nevertheless, there is a deep uncertainty about the boundaries that divide the world of livings from the one of the deads, and the doorway between these two places is often characterized by a gray zone where borders become blurred, hence creating a very dangerous contact zone between the two areas. The bridge and, in some sense, the guardian of this liminal area is precisely the shamaness. The porosity between the two worlds in this area allows a two-way communication, from the shamans towards the world of the deads, but also from the deads towards our world, in a kind of coming back taking the form of possessions or other mediumistic activities.

Behind the itakos experience we can find a processual conception of dying: from the moment of the physical death, indeed, the dead begins a journey, often full of dangers, that finally brings him in the other world. The long interlude between the first death and the complete assimilation in the ancestors’ society is extremely troublesome, becouse this is the moment in which the borders between the two worlds are more fragile, and the deads in becoming represent a huge menace, because they are not fixed and defined completely.

Their biggest desire to come back makes them dangerous for the symbolic order, and it is in this sitution that the itakoes find their legitimation, and work in this gray zone between the two worlds. Who are the deads, and in particular the angry deads? In order to understand the destiny and the status of the deads in general, it is fundamental to consider the dynamics of the dozoku, defined by Hori Ichiro as the base unit of the social, economical and religious life in the village. Within this framework, the logic of the ancestors’ cult play a leading role in the coherence and unity of the dozoku. Our concern, by the way, is more precisely about the angry deads, onthological category that holds something more then the normal deads (more dangerous, more polluted, ecc..), and something less (they are not completely deads).

The middle status of these deads is the main reason for their expultion from the genealogy. I propose here one temporary classification of these angry deads: we have the mizuko, the souls of the dead childrens; the muenbotoke, spirits without progeny, who didn’t accomplished their social duties in life; and last but not least, the goryo, vengeful souls who, in life, could not realize their ambitions or desires because of a sudden and violent death. This violent death is in fact the “common denominator” (we must notice that chinese and sino-japanese languages have a specific words for premature death, yaozhe/ yosetsu.)

The way in which life is brutally interrupted are extremely diversified; accidents, deseases, homicides, death on a battlefield, suicide out of passions. These are all souls consumed by passion, desires of glory or power, all deprived of their own life before their desires could be satisfied. Also the living can feel that these deads suffered an unjust destiny, which caused them a terrible and tragic incompletness. Ultimately, they are perceived as victimes of a cruel fate. All the goryo souls (and the others connected to them) are bind together by a this “rest of life” unused, a time suspended between the potentiality of life and the inevitability of death.

This unfulfilment connected to unsatisfied desires makes them extremely dangerous, because they often try the get revenge of anythink that seems to impede them from the realization of their desires. Since they died in a state of strong unfulfilled passion, they stick to this world, and can not enter the society of the dead ot obtain the Buddhahood. As a consequence, the angry deads become the first cause of other violent and premature deaths, expecially through epidemics and disasters; in this way we see the creation of a terrible chain of death and of vengeful spirits. The buddhist thought elaborate the theme of the angry ghosts in the image of the gaki (hungry demons with bloated abdomen) which, punished for guilty deeds in a previous life, are condamned to rebird in the second of the Six Realms, the Gakido: symbolizing the eternal hunger, the gaki represent the painfull frustration that occludes the path to enlightenment.

What are the techniques usually used to avoid the return of these vengeful spirits? Exclusion and expulsion rituals: the first and strongest reaction of the living society in relation to these souls is to send them away. The most widespread rituals are the one called okuri (send away). One of the most frequent structures in these rituals consists in the expulsion of an object (a twig, a human or animal statuette..) which is considered to be capable of include all the ominous forces. When the object completely emprisoned these forces, it is abandoned or thrown away, outside the borders of the community (the sea, a river..), or is burnt. Communication and pacification rituals: There are moments, nevertheless, in which the expulsion rites are not enough to avoid the danger of the deads.

It is in these cases that the itakos operate, not chasing away the spirits, but providing a communication with them, and allowing them to communicate with their relatives in this world. She thus helps to satisfy their demands, which will help them to gain peace, making them harmless. We can see, in this second category of ritual strategies, a different relation to these spirit, a more positive one, which accepts the possibility of a shift from a dangerous power to a positive and protective one. That is also the reason for the birth of the Goryo-e, the celebrations for goryo vengeful souls.

METHODS, THEORIC ISSUES AND RESEARCH PHASES

I am already familiar with the subject of the itako because it has been the main topic of my Master Degree work; nevertheless, I want here to deepen my analysis in different directions, and from different point of view. First of all, I will start from a very accurate fieldwork, in the Northeastern Japan, the Tohoku: in particular, I would lead the job in the Miyagi Prefecture (Ojika Peninsula, Ishinomaki, ecc) and in the Aomori Prefecture, with a main interest in Aomori City, Mount Ozore and its collective rituals, and Mutsu in the Shimokita peninsula. I would like to study all the aspects that I could not examine properly in my previous work; the collection of direct accounts of itako initiations and rituals, from shamaness themselfs, their assistents, the clients who actually ask for their services and the local cult associations (in particular the ones devoted to the kami / bodhisattva Jizo).

The aim is, therefor, to understand the contemporary collective imagination concerning itakos, vengeful spirits and their influence in the society. Consequently, and as an effect of the evolutions in the japanese anthropological discourse, I would reconsider the latest developements and modify my instruments and lexicon, in order to better place my work in the contemporary debates.

In particular I am think of a further analysis starting from the works of Kawamura, Sakurai, and Miller (about shamanism and Itako), or Brigitte Baptandier, Lafluer and Formaneker about death and dying in Japan, or more over Feure, Cueves and Stone about buddhist death and female pollution. Finally, my biggest effort will lead to a theoric elaboration of the whole issue, reconsidering all the loci classici of the japanese shamanic topic: the particular role of women, the fundamental importance of kegare, ideas of onthological and sociological liminality, processual death, ecc..

Without assuming to revolutionize these issues, I intend to introduce some shifting in the problematics: – historicize the female shaman issue, considering corollary problematics: how does the itako activities is rebuilt in the confrontation with the weakening of great institutionalized religions? How to piece together the transformations of the feminine shamanism? How these transformations effect the shamanic activity itself?

– Come out from the canonic theories about impurity and pollution (Shintani, ecc.) in order to show that kegare cover different realities and meanings.

– Study in deep the complex interactions between the different techniques used by the different specialists of spirits, underlying the contaminations and the modifications; the complex of premature death, and of unfulfilled desires are involved in different symbolic universes.

I consider to develope the fieldwork from Fall 2012 to Spring 2013. I consider to stay in Aomori city, and then moving in the prefecture in accordance to the various research inputs (i.e. Mount Ozore collective rituals in October, contact with different local associations and clients, contact with itako from different areas..)