The God in the Mirror
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey
The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.
Around 1797, Matsudaira Sadanobu (1759–1829), the feudal ruler of Shirakawa domain and senior advisor to the Japanese shogun, turned his gaze inward and declared himself a “god” (kami). He commissioned a wooden statue of himself and then installed it in a purpose-built Hall of Divine Resonance (Kan’nōden). Confident that death would fully exalt him into a Nation Protecting Great God (Shukoku Daimyōjin), he conducted daily rites of veneration to this statue, as his own ritual proxy. This was no ordinary household altar, but a “living shrine” (seishi).
Matsudaira drew upon an audacious rationale: Through perfect devotion to oneself and relentless self-discipline, humans might become gods. He styled himself a practitioner of the “Divine Martial Way” (Shinbu no michi) and left behind an “Ascetic Record” (Shugyō roku) of the ever-increasing austerities intended to culminate in divinity.
Matsudaira is sometimes dismissed as a colorful eccentric, for scholars often assume that deification is a posthumous honor conferred by a community according to ritual traditions and the attestation of postmortem miracles. Yet, the idea that a living person might be a god was hardly Matsudaira’s own invention; it was the product of an evolving countertradition.
Beginning in the fifteenth century, a new grammar of apotheosis emerged in Japan, the subject of my upcoming entry “Apotheosis in Japan” for the Archive of Mystical Experiences project. At its center stood the Yoshida house, a cadet branch of a hereditary clan of diviners whose main clients were the imperial family. Sometime during the life of clan leader Yoshida Kanetomo (1435-1511), this influential family moved away from Buddhist funerary practices and began burying rather than cremating their departed, raising a small shrine over the grave and venerating their ancestor directly as a kami.
The Yoshidas’ innovative funeral rites were initially private, but feudal lords across Japan eventually petitioned the Yoshidas to confer “divine titles” (shingō), sanctifying their deceased relatives as deities. In some cases, after the Yoshida granted posthumous titles, the new deity became the focus of popular worship. In others, the new title changed little, and veneration of the deity vanished as the memory of the deceased faded.
Divine titles were not only bestowed on the departed. While alive, Yamazaki Ansai (1619-1682), a former Buddhist monk-turned-Confucian and the founder of a movement known as Suika Shintō, established a “living shrine” housing a mirror he claimed contained his own “mind-god” (shinshin), making him a living divinity. The choice of the mirror as “divine vessel” (shintai) was no accident, for mirrors had long been tied to Shinto sanctuaries. Playing on the phonetic overlap of kagami 鏡, meaning “mirror,” and kami 神, meaning deity, Yamazaki declared: “The heart of the divine is like a bright mirror without a single speck of cloudiness. As a metaphorical expression of this, the use of kagami arose. Then the middle ga was dropped, giving the form kami.” Through this folk etymology, he cast the shrine’s mirror as the manifest reflection of his divine mind. This seems to have been convincing. In 1671, the head of the Yoshida family endorsed not only Yamazaki’s shrine but also publicly ratified his startling self-apotheosis by recognizing his divine name while still alive.
The Yoshida clan did not have a monopoly on deification. Sometimes an individual could effect auto-apotheosis without their stamp of approval. One famous example is the samurai Honda Tadatomo (1582–1615), who drunkenly failed in battle in 1614. The following year, he fought honorably and was mortally wounded in combat. On his deathbed, Honda swore to become a deity to aid anyone who wished to renounce drinking, effecting his self-apotheosis. He was enshrined at Osaka’s Ishinji, a Buddhist temple, and today he continues to be worshipped there as the God of Temperance (Sake-fūji no Kami), helping those struggling with alcoholism.
In addition to traditional grammars of Japanese deification, a distinctive formula of divinity through auto-apotheosis crystallized starting in the fifteenth century. The historian Katō Genchi compiled eighty-five Japanese self-divinized “living gods” between 1600 and 1934. Divine status was typically actualized by successors and legitimated by ritual authorities like the Yoshida, but it was no longer something only conferred from without. Now divinity could be apprehended from within, willed into being by the person who claimed it.
Auto-apotheosis asserts the sheer force of individual will over, and sometimes against, older economies of recognition. It stands as an alternative to longstanding modes of deification from external spiritual authorities. Divinity could now be seized before it was conferred. Mastsudaira’s statue, Yamazaki’s mirror, and Honda’s deathbed oath took shape within a developing countertradition that treated transcendence as the hard-won product of self-directed ritual labor.