The Catalpa Bow, A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan. By Carmen Blacker. George Allen and Unwin: London, 1975. Pp. 376. £8.75.

TLDR: The main thrust of the book characterizes two complementary types of religious specialist, the receptive shamaness type, including the ancient and traditional miko, the possessed foundresses of new cults in modern times, and the rather pathetic, blind itako, pushed into a now quite artificial routine of mediumship for mere social convenience as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: Shamanism is remote from modern western experience. There is something doubly fascinating about it in the context of Japan, which is at once culturally near and distant for European observers. Moreover, the subject is a manysided one, and in this very unusual book Carmen Blacker has brought together several different approaches into an indissoluble synthesis. Perhaps the most striking single feature is the welding together of historical, literary and folklorist allusions with a substantial element of participant observation of a more or less anthropological kind. The reader is helped by a generous view of the subject-matter which is allowed to include more or less introductory chapters on supernatural beings, cosmology ('the other world') and ascesis. There are many points in the book at which the phenomena described are not specifically shamanistic in any precise sense, but in so far as there is a Japanese shamanism it is certainly to be delineated within the overall field presented. It might, indeed, be more accurate to describe the work as an introduction to Japanese folk religion. However, the writer is absolutely correct in making the definitions serve the phenomena and not vice versa. The main thrust of the book characterizes two complementary types of religious specialist. The first is the receptive shamaness type, including the ancient and traditional miko, the possessed foundresses of new cults in modern times, and the rather pathetic, blind itako, pushed into a now quite artificial routine of mediumship for mere social convenience. These are indeed disparate figures, but each is evidence of an archaic tradition of specialist communication with 'the other world', and, moreover, a tradition which has many points in common with the wider North Asian shamanism. Although the evidence is rather fragmentary, it does seem to indicate a coherent pattern of religious activity. Without being offered a pedantic framework, the reader is suggestively introduced to that world of semi-articulate communication through images and rituals, which allows such archaic religious patterns to resurface, as if spontaneously. The second type is the spiritual pilgrim who wrests his or her special powers of healing, prediction or exorcism, by sheer ascetic endurance, from the mysterious world of spiritual power. The features of initiation and spiritual journey, whether purely visionary or physically enacted on the sacred mountains, are important links with the wider phenomenon of shamanism. At the same time, these practices are partly inspired and regulated by Buddhism, mainly in terms of the highly symbolic Shingon form which had such an influence on popular Japanese religion.