Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Kami, Spirit and Sacred Power gathers twelve concepts naming the presence and force religions locate in the world without always calling it a god, most of them Shinto's own vocabulary for that presence.

Kami is the central term and the hardest to translate, not a class matching the Greek or Roman gods but the classic definition names anything that inspires a sense of awe or wonder. Musubi is the generative power by which such things come into being and bind to one another, and mitama and tamashii describe the spirit or soul that animates a kami, the dead or a living person, held to be loosely attached rather than fixed and capable of showing different aspects. Kegare and harae complete the ritual logic, pollution as a withering of life force that separates a person from the kami, and purification as its remedy, while kannagara names the ideal of living in harmony with the kami's own nature and matsuri is the festival through which they are served, fed and honored.

Outside Shinto the same problem of locating sacred power recurs independently. Ancient Egyptian temple cult is described through the God Present in the Image and the Animating of Statues, a daily service of waking, washing and feeding a god's own image, and Hermetic writing that claims the same power could be called down into a statue by ritual means. The Awen names the Welsh poetic inspiration modern Druidry has put at the centre of its practice, chanted as three drawn syllables. Umai closes the group in the Old Turkic inscriptions, a power of birth and protection named alongside Tengri, the sacred earth and water of the homeland.