I am not a practitioner or follower of Shinto and I’ve never even been to Japan. Some years ago the subject of the kami ‘crossed my desk’ in some way. This was in the early days of the Internet and doing a few judicious searches didn’t return anything relevant. After reading some dead trees, I wrote up these pages so the next person doing a search would find something.

Shinto is an animistic religion native to Japan.  In Shinto there are eight million kami, however the number eight and million was also used to denote many, so lets just say their are lots of them. Every rock, animal, spring, emotion, quality and even person has a kami associated with it. The spirits of the dead are kami.

At some point it would be useful to define exactly what is a kami. There are number of possible answers to this, from the western perspective the easiest answer would be just to call them gods (in the Greek and Roman pantheistic tradition), but I think this mis-represents things. According to Shinto, when your father dies his spirit becomes a kami. The kami seem to run gamut from ghosts and other spirits to what we would clearly call gods in other traditions.

Purification plays a large part in Shintoism. Water, exorcism, and abstention are all methods of purification.

Shinto