[Home]History of Shinto

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Revision 5 . . (edit) October 20, 2001 8:46 am by (logged).192.137.xxx [change hexadecimal Unicode to decimal]
Revision 4 . . October 17, 2001 10:19 am by (logged).192.137.xxx [added Unicode for the Kanji for Shinto]
Revision 3 . . October 17, 2001 12:48 am by (logged).2.20.xxx [working in some old lecture notes of mine]
Revision 2 . . September 26, 2001 7:02 pm by Pinkunicorn [Added lots of links]
  

Difference (from prior major revision) (minor diff, author diff)

Changed: 5c5
The most immediately striking theme in the Shinto religion is a great love and reverence for nature. Thus, a waterfall, the moon, or just an oddly shaped rock might come to be regarded as a kami; so might charismatic persons or more abstract entities like growth and fertility. As time went by, the original nature-worshipping roots of the religion, while never lost entirely, became attenuated and the kami took on more reified and anthropomorphic forms, with a formidable corpus of myth attached to them. The kami, though, are not transcendent deities in the usual Western and Indian sense of the word - although divine, they are close to us; they inhabit the same world as we do. Thus, Shinto, from a combination of two Chinese words meaning "the way of the spirits" came into being.
The most immediately striking theme in the Shinto religion is a great love and reverence for nature. Thus, a waterfall, the moon, or just an oddly shaped rock might come to be regarded as a kami; so might charismatic persons or more abstract entities like growth and fertility. As time went by, the original nature-worshipping roots of the religion, while never lost entirely, became attenuated and the kami took on more reified and anthropomorphic forms, with a formidable corpus of myth attached to them. The kami, though, are not transcendent deities in the usual Western and Indian sense of the word - although divine, they are close to us; they inhabit the same world as we do. Thus, Shinto, from a combination of two Chinese words (神道) meaning "the way of the spirits" came into being.

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