Occult Japan - The Way of the Gods: Shinto Ritual, Spirit Possession, and Pilgrimage in Meiji Japan

Occult Japan: The Way of the Gods is Percival Lowell's searching account of Shinto practice as he encountered it in Meiji Japan, especially its rites of possession, pilgrimage, ascetic discipline, and visionary performance. Written in a polished late-Victorian prose that combines travel narrative, comparative religion, and ethnographic observation, the book belongs to the era's formative literature on Japan, yet it is more attentive than most to lived ritual rather than merely aesthetic surface. Lowell was an American scholar-traveler later famous for his astronomical work, but before turning decisively to Mars he immersed himself in East Asian cultures, publishing several studies of Japan and Korea. His access to Japanese informants, his fascination with systems of belief, and his willingness to observe ceremonies firsthand shaped this unusual volume, in which curiosity about the unseen world meets the intellectual habits of a nineteenth-century scientific observer. Readers interested in Japanese religion, Meiji cultural history, or the Western discovery of East Asia will find this book both revealing and provocative. Though marked by assumptions of its time, it remains a valuable document: a lucid, often vivid attempt to understand Shinto not as abstraction, but as experience, discipline, and sacred drama.