ABSTRACT
This paper considers the symbolic politics of water at Akakura Mountain Shrine, a popular Buddhist-inflected Shinto institution in northeastern Japan long associated with female charismatic spirit mediumship. Women ascetics undertake transformative, ritualized climbs along a mountain stream and perform vision-granting austerities at a sacred waterfall dedicated to the fierce Buddhist deity Fudô Myôô. These ascents continue across the annual cycle, as the waterfall is obscured from sight by winter snows and then gradually made visible again during the warm months. Through their rituals, the shrine’s congregation collectively reproduces itself and its relationship to mountain divinities through complex transpositions of the mountain’s water, understood as gifts of “the dragon princess,” an avatar of ancient indigenous capacity. The invisible and visible water flows may be understood in reference to Freud’s discussion of the uncanny, forces that, in principle, should be hidden and yet which unexpectedly return to our vision, signaling fissures in structures of psychic and politico-historical repression.
