Mitama

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mitama ( Japanese 御 魂 or 御 霊 , dt. About: "Honorable soul") is an esoteric concept in Shintō and describes the spirit or soul of a kami . Usually only the mitama of a kami is worshiped and venerated in Shinto shrines , not the kami itself.

Mi- is an honorific prefix and indicates the affiliation of the tama or tamashii ( 魂 , cf. also Yamato-damashii ) to a kami. Tama, in turn, is not identical with the Christian concept of the soul; it is also a concept that is much older than Shinto itself. Tama can in principle apply to any object in the world, even if not every one can become a mitama .

The British Japanese scientist WG Aston (1841–1911) compared the mitama with the Jewish Schechinah  .

Parts

Tama or mitama are seen in different concepts made up of several parts.

A popular approach is that part of the mitama is the kuni-mitama , which controls the unconscious movements of the body and begins to exist upon conception. The other part is the wake-mitama , the tama of the parents, whose entry into the body completes the tama of the child and separates from it again at death.

Aspects

According to the Ichirei-shikon concept ( 一 霊 四 魂 , "one spirit, four souls"), a spirit ( ichi rei ) consists of four souls / tama ( shikon ) for every kami and every person :

  • ara-mitama ( 荒 御 霊 or 荒 御 魂 ; savagery, rawness, anger, destroying evil, building up good, rule qua authority)
  • nigi-mitama ( 和 御 霊 or 和 御 魂 ; creating mildness, calm, peace, noble, harmony and unity)
  • saki-mitama or sachi-mitama ( 幸 御 霊 or 幸 御 魂 ; happiness, blossoming, both distributing blessings and giving love and creation)
  • kushi-mitama or kushibi-mitama ( 奇 御 霊 or 奇 御 魂 ; wondrousness, secrecy and ugliness, wisdom, invention and discovery, causing mysterious transformations)

The exact determination of their meanings and relationships to one another are very complicated and depend heavily on different doctrines.

A kami can simultaneously be an aspect of the mitama of another kami (according to the Nihongi, Ō-mono-nushi saki-mitama and kushi-mitama from Ō-kuni-nushi ) or be revered as an independent kami. Since the Meiji period, however, no new shrine has been built for the worship of a single aspect.

The Ara-matsuri-no-miya in Ise-jingū

The aspects can also be stored separately from one another and in different places and shintai (sometimes even several times). So there are z. B. in the Ise-jingū a secondary shrine ( bessha or betsugu ) called Ara-matsuri-no-miya for the ara-mitama of Amaterasu . In Atsuta-jingū there is a sessha , the Ichi-no-misaki-jinja, for Amaterasus ara-mitama and a massha , the Toosu-no-yashiro, for her nigi-mitama .

Legend has it that Jingū -kōgō was accompanied by the ara-mitama of the Sumiyoshi-no-kami on their campaign to Korea , while the nigi-mitama stayed in Japan. Another version of this legend says that the ara-mitama protected the army, while the nigi-mitama protected the empress-wife herself.

swell

  1. ^ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Volume XI, entry "Shinto"

Web links