Occult Japan/Ontaké
OCCULT JAPAN.
ONTAKÉ.
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N the heart of Japan, withdrawn alike by distance and by height from the commonplaces of the every-day world, rises a mountain known as Ontaké or the Honorable Peak. It is a fine volcanic mass, sundered by deep valley-clefts from the great Hida-Shinshiu range, amidst which it stands dignifiedly aloof. Active once, it has been inactive now beyond the memory of man. Yet its form lets one divine what it must have been in its day. For upon its summit are the crumbling walls of eight successive craters, piled in parapet up into the sky.
It is not dead; it slumbers. For on its western face a single solfatara sends heavenward long, slender filaments of vapor, faint breath of what now sleeps beneath; a volcano sunk in trance.
Almost unknown to foreigners, it is well known to the Japanese. For it is perhaps the most sacred of Japan's many sacred peaks. Upon it, every summer, faith tells a rosary of ten thousand pilgrims.
Some years ago I chanced to gaze from afar upon this holy mount; and, as the sweep of its sides drew my eye up to where the peak itself stood hidden in a nimbus of cloud, had meant some day to climb it. Partly for this vision, more because of the probable picturesqueness of the route, I found myself doing so with a friend in August, 1891. Beyond the general fact of its sanctity, nothing special was supposed to attach to the peak. That the mountain held a mystery was undreamed of.
We had reached, after various vicissitudes, as prosaically as is possible in unprosaic Japan, a height of about nine thousand feet, when we suddenly came upon a manifestation as surprising as it was unsuspected. Regardless of us, the veil was thrown aside, and we gazed into the beyond. We stood face to face with the gods.
The fathoming of this unexpected revelation resulted in the discovery of a world of esoteric practices as significant as they were widespread. By way of introduction to them, I cannot do more simply than to give my own. Set as the scene of it was upon the summit of that slumbering volcano sunk in trance itself, a presentation to the gods could hardly have been more dramatic.
We had plodded four fifths way up the pilgrim path. We had already passed the first snow, and had reached the grotto-like hut at the eighth station—the paths up all high sacred mountains in Japan being pleasingly pointed by rest-houses; we were tarrying there a moment, counting our heartbeats, and wondering how much more of the mountain there might be to come, for thick cloud had cloaked all view on the ascent, when three young men, clad in full pilgrim white, entered the hut from below, and, deaf to the hut-keeper's importunities to stop, passed stolidly out at the upper end: the hut having been astutely contrived to inclose the path, that not even the most ascetic might escape temptation. The devout look of the trio struck our fancy. So, leaving some coppers for our tea and cakes, amid profuse acknowledgment from the hut-keeper, we passed out after them. We had not climbed above a score of rods when we overtook our young puritans lost in prayer before a shrine cut into the face of the cliff, in front of which stood two or three benches conspicuously out of place in such a spot. The three young men had already laid aside their hats, mats, and staffs, and disclosed the white fillets that bound their shocks of jet-black hair. We halted on general principles of curiosity, for we had no inkling of what was about to happen. They were simply the most pious young men we had yet met, and they interested us.
The prayer, which seemed an ordinary one, soon came to an end; upon which we expected to see the trio pack up and be off again. But instead of this one of them, drawing from his sleeve a gohei-wand, and certain other implements of religion, seated himself upon one of the benches facing the shrine. At the same time another sat down on a second bench facing the first, clasped his hands before his breast, and closed his eyes. The third reverently took post near by.
No sooner was the first seated than he launched into the most extraordinary performance I have ever beheld. With a spasmodic jerk, pointed by a violent guttural grunt, he suddenly tied his ten fingers into a knot, throwing his whole body and soul into the act. At the same time he began a monotonic chant. Gazing raptly at his digital knot, he prayed over it thus a moment; then, with a second grunt, he resolved it into a second one, and this into a third and a fourth and a fifth, stringing his contortions upon his chant with all the vehemence of a string of oaths. Startlingly uncouth as the action was, the compelling intentness and suppressed power with which the paroxysmal pantomime was done, was more so.
His strange action was matched only by the strange inaction of his vis-á-vis. The man did not move a muscle; if anything, he grew momentarily more statuesque. And still the other's monotoned chant rolled on, startlingly emphasized by the contortion knots.
At last the exorcist paused in his performance, and taking the gohei-wand from beside him on the bench, placed it between the other's hands, clenched one above the other. Then he resumed his incantation, the motionless one as motionless as ever. So it continued for some time, when all at once the hands holding the wand began to twitch convulsively; the twitching rapidly increased to a spasmodic throe which momentarily grew more violent till suddenly it broke forth into the full fury of a seemingly superhuman paroxysm. It was as if the wand shook the man, not the man it. It lashed the air maniacally here and there above his head, and then slowly settled to a semi-rigid half-arm holding before his brow; stiff, yet quivering, and sending its quivers through his whole frame. The look of the man was unmistakable. He had gone completely out of himself. Unwittingly we had come to stand witnesses to a trance.
At the first sign of possession, the exorcist had ceased incanting and sat bowed awaiting the coming presence. When the paroxysmal throes had settled into a steady quiver—much as a top does when it goes off to sleep—he leaned forward, put a hand on either side the possessed's knees, and still bowed, asked in words archaically reverent the name of the god who had thus deigned to descend.
At first there was no reply. Then in a voice strangely unnatural, without being exactly artificial, the entranced spake: "I am Hakkai."
The petitioner bent yet lower; then raising his look a little, preferred respectfully what requests he had to make; whether the peak would be clear and the pilgrimage prove propitious, and whether the loved ones left at home would all be guarded by the god? And the god made answer: "Till the morrow's afternoon will the peak be clear, and the pilgrimage shall be blessed."
The man stayed bowed while the god spake, and when the god had finished speaking, offered up an adoration prayer. Then leaning forward, he first touched the possessed on the breast, and then struck him on the back several times with increasing insistency. Under this ungodly treatment the possessed opened his eyes like one awaking from profound sleep. The others then set to and kneaded his arms, body, and legs, cramped in catalepsy, back to a normal state.
No sooner was the ex-god himself again than the trio changed places; the petitioner moved into the seat of the entranced, the looker-on took the place of the petitioner, and the entranced retired to the post of looker-on. Then with this change of persons the ceremony was gone through with again to a similar possession, a similar interview, and a similar awakening.
At the close of the second trance the three once more revolved cyclically and went through the performance for the third time. This rotation in possession so religiously observed was not the least strange detail of this strange drama.
When the cycle had been completed, the three friends offered up a concluding prayer, and then, donning their outside accoutrements, started upward.
Revolving in our minds what we had thus so strangely been suffered to see, we too proceeded, and, being faster walkers, had soon distanced our god-acquaintances. We had not been long upon the summit, however, when they appeared again, and no sooner had they arrived, than they sat down upon some other benches similarly standing in the little open space before the tip-top shrine, and went through their cyclical possessions as before. We had not thought to see the thing a second time, and were almost as much astounded as at first.
Our fear of parting with our young god-friends proved quite groundless. For on returning to the summit-hut after a climb round the crater rim, the first thing to catch our eyes amid its dim religious gloom was the sight of the pious trio once more in the full throes of possession. There were plenty of other pilgrims seated round the caldron fire, as well as some native meteorologists in an annex, who had been exiled there for a month by a paternal government to study the atmospheric conditions of this island in the clouds. Up to the time we met them the weather had been dishearteningly same, consisting, they informed us somewhat pathetically, of uninterrupted fog. The exorcists, however, took no notice of them, nor of any of the other pilgrims, nor did the rest of the company pay the slightest heed to the exorcists; all of which spoke volumes for the commonplaceness of the occurrence.
We again thought we had seen our last of the gods, and again were we pleasurably disappointed. At five the next morning we had hardly finished a shivery preprandial peep at the sunrise,—all below us a surging sea of cloud,—and turned once more into the hut, when there were the three indefatigables up and communing again by way of breakfast, for they took none other, and an hour later we came upon them before the tip-top shrine, hard at it for the fifth time. And all this between four o'clock one afternoon and six the next morning. The cycle was not always completed, one of the three being much better at possession than the other two, and one much worse, but there were safely ten trances in the few hours that fringed their sleep's oblivion.
And nobody, apparently, took any cognizance of what was going on, except us and the meteorologists, who came out to fraternize with us, and volunteered comments in a superior manner on the senselessness of the proceeding,—an imported attitude of mind not destitute of caricature.
Truly the gods were gracious thus to descend so many times; and truly devout their devotees to crave so much communion. Doubtless an inordinate desire for their society is gratifying to the gods, but the frequency of the talks fairly took our breath away, though it had no perceptible effect on the young men's nor on the god's, even at that altitude. The god possessed his devotees with comparative ease; which was edifying but exhausting; for to let another inhabit one's house always proves hard on the furniture. And all this took place on top of a climb of ten thousand feet toward heaven. In spite of it, however, these estimable young men were equal to a tramp all over the place during the rest of the morning. They ascended religiously to all the crater-peaks, and descended as piously to all the crater-pools—and then started on their climb down and their journey home of three hundred and fifty miles, much of it to be done afoot. That night saw them not only off the mountain, but well on their way beyond. How far their holy momentum carried them without stopping I know not, for the last we saw of them was a wave of farewell as they passed the inn where we had put up for the night. But the most surprising part of the endurance lay in the fact that from the moment they began the ascent of the mountain on the early morning of the one day, till they were off it on the late afternoon of the next, they ate nothing and drank only water.
Such was my introduction to the society of the gods; and this first glimpse of it only piqued curiosity to more. No sooner back in town, therefore, than I made inquiry into the acquaintanceship I had so strangely formed upon the mountain, to receive the most convincing assurance of its divinity. The fact of possession was confirmed readily enough, but my desire for a private repetition of the act itself was received at first with some mystery and more hesitation. However, with one man after another, offishness thawed, until, getting upon terms of cordiality with deity, it was not long before I was holding divine receptions in my own drawing-room. Exalted and exclusive as this best of all society unquestionably was, it proved intellectually, like more mundane society we agree to call the best, undeniably dull. I mention this not because I did not find it well worth knowing, but simply to show that it was every whit the company it purported to be.
II.
The revelation thus strangely vouchsafed me turned out to be as far-reaching as it was sincere. There proved to exist a regular system of divine possession, an esoteric cult imbedded in the very heart and core of the Japanese character and instinct, with all the strangeness of that to us enigmatical race.
That other foreigners should not previously have been admitted to this company of heaven may at first seem the strangest fact of all. Certainly my introduction cannot be due to any special sanctity of my own, if I may judge by what my friends tell me on the subject. Nor can I credit it to any desire on my part to rise in the world, whether to peaks or preferments—an equally base ambition in either case—for Ontaké, though not of every-day ascent, has been climbed by foreigners several times before. Rein, that indefatigable collector of facts and statistics, managed some years ago to get to the top of it and then to the bottom again without seeing anything. The old guide-book, in the person of an enthusiastic pedestrian, contrived to do the like. Other visitors of good locomotive powers also accomplished this feat without penetrating the secret of the mountain. And yet the trances were certainly going on all the time, and the guides who piloted these several gentlemen must have been well aware of the fact.
The explanation is to be sought elsewhere. The fact is that Japan is still very much of an undiscovered country to us. It is not simply that the language proves so difficult that but few foreigners pass this threshold of acquaintance; but that the farther the foreigner goes, the more he perceives the ideas in the two hemispheres to be fundamentally diverse. What he expects to find does not exist, and what exists he would never dream of looking for.
Japan is scientifically an undiscovered country even to the Japanese, as a study of these possessions will disclose. For their importance is twofold: archaeologic no less than psychic. They are other-world manifestations in two senses, and the one sense helps accentuate the other. For they are as essentially Japanese as they are essentially genuine. That is, they are neither shams nor importations from China or India, but aboriginal originalities of the Japanese people. They are the hitherto unsuspected esoteric side of Shintō, the old native faith. That Japanese Buddhists also practice them is but appreciative Buddhist indorsement of their importance, as I shall show later. We must begin, therefore, with a short account of Shintō in general.
