Ryan Holmberg

There are surprisingly few good books on Japanese occult and esoteric traditions in English. You'd think that in a society like ours that's certifiably crazy about anime, not to mention plenty of other aspects of Japanese culture, there would be plenty in print on the abundant and complex lore of Japanese occultism, but that's not the case. It takes plenty of digging to find even basic information about such core traditions of Japanese wizardry as Onmyodo and Mikkyo, to say nothing of the older and stranger dimensions of Japan's magic.  One fine exception to that unhappy rule is Carmen Blacker's The Catalpa Bow. An English academic, Blacker became interested in the shamanistic dimensions of Japanese folk magic and spent years visiting isolated rural areas of Japan, attending ceremonies, participating in ascetic practices, and talking with practitioners who preserved the last scraps of traditions dating back centuries or millennia. The result was one of the genuine classics of the anthropology of religion, a sensitive and sympathetic study of branches of folk magic so archaic that few Japanese these days know much about them.  This is a world inhabited by miko, female mediums who go into trance to foretell the future and give voice to ghosts and fox-spirits; shugenja, ascetics who practice harsh austerities on sacred mountains to win the power to banish evil spirits and heal supernatural illnesses; Buddhist clerics who wield the powers of esoteric mantras and mandalas; and the spiritual beings with whom all these interact and contend, from magic snakes and greedy fox-spirits through unhappy ghosts and nature spirits to the gods of Shinto and the buddhas and bodhisattvas of the esoteric Buddhist pantheon. It's a weird, wild world, and Blacker provides a fine introduction to it.  This book has a special place in my heart; I first read it in the fall of 1980 as a college freshman, and it filled a role in relation to occultism that several previous books had done in other subjects. Elizabeth Seeger's The Five Sons of King Pandu, a retelling of the Hindu epic Mahabharata for young readers, did it in the field of legend and mythology, and Lester Brooks' Great Civilizations of Ancient Africa did it in the field of history; in each of these cases and others, I'd learned a lot about the Western world's experience and then encountered the parallel experience of another continent, and the encounter thoroughly redefined my understanding of the subject.  My way of thinking about occultism changed and broadened considerably because of this book.  Beyond that considerable impact, Blacker's book also showed me that it was possible to investigate magical traditions in a scholarly manner without being dismissive about them. (Long before anyone else was talking about firewalks, for example, Blacker participated in a firewalk, admitted that something very strange was going on, and simply left the matter at that.) Finally, the book's pleasant and lively to read.  If that sounds like a hearty recommendation, why, it should; I'd encourage anyone with the least interest in occult and spiritual traditions to give it a read.