Take a moment right now and look at your
hands. More specifically, look at your fingernails. Are they nice and
clean? Well-shaped or painted? Could your hands be the ones in a
commercial on TV which clasp the cologne bottle in a close-up?
Have they recently touched anything withered, dead, or afflicted
with disease? And while we are on the subject of close-ups, how
about the bottoms of your feet? Or the condition of your large in-
testine? Had intimate contact lately with any errors, sickness, or
disaster? If the questioning above makes you uncomfortable or em-
barrassed, then it is likely you would qualify for a ritual purifica-
tion -- one of the central themes running through the core of Shinto
practice. Any season or day of the year is suitable for purifications,
but summer especially so, since it is a time fraught with danger from
a wide number of sources. But more about this in a moment.

Purification of physical and psychological impediments to one's
relationship with the divine is, in general, one of the great overarch-
ing themes shared by systems of ritual practice and belief throughout
the world. As Mary Douglas observed, "Reflection on dirt involves
reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being,
form to formlessness, and life to death" ( 1970, 5). "Dirt" is per-
haps putting it a little bluntly for the case of Shinto ritual practices,
but certainly the notion of what constitutes order and disorder in
early agricultural communities was intimately related and relevant
to the survival of those communities and formed part of the foun-
dation for Japanese social and cultural norms. In societies all over
the world, rites of purification create numerous escape hatches from
what is otherwise the sinking ship of our physical condition, afflicted

-101-