ABSTRACT
AS IS EVIDENT in the preceding chapter, most matsuri, whether Shinto or Buddhist, pay homage to one or more visiting deities. Festival time, as we have seen, is a time when deities enter the community in various manners and shapes, and the community and the deity commune, forming a totality. The visiting deities give the matsuri their basic structure. The renewal of time and order, and of man and community depended upon the parallel renewal of the deity itself. Only through a renewed deity can people renew themselves, their community, their territory and the order that they sought to impose on all these aspects of life. A festival was no festival without the ‘visible’ or ‘tangible’ presence of the deity; during festival time, people met with the deities in an extraordinary manner, seeking mutual renewal by crossing over the boundary of the two states of being. For successful renewal, humans must become divine and the divine visible, so that order can be revived through a simultaneous transformation, and not by imposition of one party upon the other.
