“Even when descendants disperse, the family remains conceptually gathered around a single origin, “like petals of a flower with a center” (p.32). The past is not a separate time, but a mode of presence.” Thank you for this wonderful article.
I have been researching my English and Slavic ancestry and cross cultural rituals for six years now for the novel I am
writing, and this idea of the ancestors and the land being intimately tied has been with me from the start.
I have felt drawn to Shinto ritual because of its beauty and the way the shrines seemed to be such an integral part of everyday life and nature. They evoke to me a mode of presence that I have been trying to get closer to.
I so agree that there is something intrinsic, and not flattening, in studying the different systems and feeling that echo of kinship between them. The branching roots.
I love the idea of the past as a mode of presence. Thank you for that. I feel like you have put words around a key concept in my own work.
The line "tradition is something shown rather than stated" captures what Yanagita understood that earlier scholars missed—that continuity lives in gesture, not text. There's a precision in how you trace the divergence: Kokugaku scholars tried to purify through documents while Yanagita walked the land listening for what people actually did. What strikes deepest is the recognition that ancestral presence isn't metaphor but practice. The dead return not because doctrine says so, but because families continue to set places, light fires, and walk into forests sensing arrival. This is memory as ritual, not record.
Inspiring read! Regarding pre-christian folk tales, I found that a Romanian perennialist scholar who wrote about this was not translated to English yet, and I tried my hand at translating a couple of his essays. it is also ancestor heavy, in a sense. The good the bad and the ugly ancestors. While there is a light Christian shade thrown on all of them, one can glimpse at the deeper layers. Here is the first one with the mother in law if anyone is interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/rvdu/p/the-jealous-mother-is-sleepy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=gnb7u
Thank you!
Hail the Ancestors!!!!
Thanks for reading ✨
Beautifully written; a sensitive flow of lineage.
Thank you!
“Even when descendants disperse, the family remains conceptually gathered around a single origin, “like petals of a flower with a center” (p.32). The past is not a separate time, but a mode of presence.” Thank you for this wonderful article.
I have been researching my English and Slavic ancestry and cross cultural rituals for six years now for the novel I am
writing, and this idea of the ancestors and the land being intimately tied has been with me from the start.
I have felt drawn to Shinto ritual because of its beauty and the way the shrines seemed to be such an integral part of everyday life and nature. They evoke to me a mode of presence that I have been trying to get closer to.
I so agree that there is something intrinsic, and not flattening, in studying the different systems and feeling that echo of kinship between them. The branching roots.
I love the idea of the past as a mode of presence. Thank you for that. I feel like you have put words around a key concept in my own work.
Thanks Ava. Best of luck
What a great article, thanks for sharing! It has given words to what I felt but couldn't express about our ancestral ways!
Thank you!
Great read, thanks for doing the work!
Thanks for reading!
The line "tradition is something shown rather than stated" captures what Yanagita understood that earlier scholars missed—that continuity lives in gesture, not text. There's a precision in how you trace the divergence: Kokugaku scholars tried to purify through documents while Yanagita walked the land listening for what people actually did. What strikes deepest is the recognition that ancestral presence isn't metaphor but practice. The dead return not because doctrine says so, but because families continue to set places, light fires, and walk into forests sensing arrival. This is memory as ritual, not record.
Inspiring read! Regarding pre-christian folk tales, I found that a Romanian perennialist scholar who wrote about this was not translated to English yet, and I tried my hand at translating a couple of his essays. it is also ancestor heavy, in a sense. The good the bad and the ugly ancestors. While there is a light Christian shade thrown on all of them, one can glimpse at the deeper layers. Here is the first one with the mother in law if anyone is interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/rvdu/p/the-jealous-mother-is-sleepy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=gnb7u
Pages 36-37 and 90-91 are missing in your scans. Any chance you have them somewhere?