Harae

Harae, also read harai, is the basic ritual act of Shinto: purification, the washing away of kegare so that a person or place recovers the brightness and cleanness that contact with the kami requires. It comes in many forms. The most elemental is misogi, immersion or ablution in water, standing under a waterfall, wading into the sea or a river, or simply rinsing hands and mouth at the stone trough set by every shrine gate.

In shrine ritual a priest performs oharae by waving the haraigushi, a wand of white paper streamers, over the worshippers, and salt may be scattered to the same end. Because pollution is a condition rather than a sin, the logic here is cleansing, not absolution: the aim is to restore purity, not to pardon guilt. Purification comes first in almost everything Shinto does, before prayer, before a festival, before a new building is raised on cleared ground, and the tradition traces the whole practice to Izanagi, who purified himself by washing after escaping the defilement of the dead.

Article one describes harae chiefly at the scale of the individual worshipper, misogi at a shrine trough, the priest's wand passed over a small gathering. Twice each year Shinto performs the same purification at a considerably larger scale, treating an entire community's accumulated pollution as something to be cleared in a single coordinated national rite.

The Oharae, Great Purification, is held at the end of the sixth month, called Nagoshi no Harae, and again at the end of the twelfth, and its most distinctive instrument is the katashiro, a small paper or cloth effigy cut roughly in human shape. Worshippers rub the katashiro against their own bodies, or breathe on it, transferring their accumulated kegare into the object, which is then burned, buried or set adrift on water, carrying the pollution away with it rather than merely washing it off in place. At many shrines the June rite also includes passing through a large ring woven from chigaya reeds, the chinowa, in a prescribed figure that is itself believed to purify whoever walks through it.

The national, calendrical scale of the Oharae is worth setting beside the individual acts of misogi article one describes, because it treats pollution as something that accumulates collectively over a fixed half-year period regardless of individual conduct, requiring periodic communal clearing whether or not any particular person has done anything wrong, which is consistent with article one's own point that kegare is a condition rather than a moral fault. A society can be due for purification on the calendar in the same way a person can be due for it after contact with death, and the Oharae is the ritual answer to the first case rather than the second.