Riffing on my prior comment thread where I imagined the wizard-hero of Vainamoinen of the Kalevala as a demi-god birthed by a female Watcher post-Deluge and thus as someone who introduced Enochian admixture into Finnish ancestry, I considered what other nations might have Enochian ancestry.
One painfully-obvious and personally-significant and utterly-humiliating example immediately came to mind.
Therefore, I realized I have firsthand experience of resonance between Enoch's Zion and Japan, based on the only trip I have taken to that part of the world, rather symbolically in the very final days of the Heisei era. I like to travel, but paradoxically never initiate a trip -- it's always someone in my family going and I tag along only if I don't have anything important to do. I saw this, the significance of which will become clear:
Here is my evidence that the Japanese are partly-descended from a Tribe of Enoch. Subsequent posts will cover cultures further-west.
The founding myth: is extremely straightforward to fit into the Enochian / Watcher schema as I understand it. A married couple (Izanagi and Izanami) descend to an area of the Earth covered in a great deluge of water and use some physical magic -- stirring the water with a spear -- to accelerate the process of land-formation. This local act, resurfacing the Japanese islands, is mistaken for a creation-myth by subsequent generations and the couple are taken to be creator-Gods. Since Watchers in general would have been forbidden after the Deluge, perhaps these Enochians were charged with some kind of special dispensation or exception or even penance (clean up your mess! is a perfectly plausible order to receive from Divine Parents) to rebuild the Earth after the Flood. This seems perfectly complementary to the alleged main strategy of repopulating everything with animals descended from Noah's ark -- I suppose God wanted to give Noah a chance to help too. What I remember of the Japanese founding gods' subsequent career certainly does not show signs of especial righteousness, definitely not in the Mormon sense, but they are extremely fertile, although they again (somewhat-confusingly for me, not for the myth-makers) end up birthing beings of a lower order: fairies and monsters and more human-scale lesser gods and through those lesser gods the lineage of myth reaches actual historically-verifiable humans.
Random ancient Magical MacGuffins: Not practical to investigate the things personally (see 'coverup-murder-spree' below) but it is worth noting the following publically-known Stories and Questionable Rumours: the Japanese Imperial Household explicitly claims lineal descent from these entirely-mythical figures and claims to possess three artefacts, claimed to be identical to mind-bogglingly powerful magical items mentioned in that cycle of legends, which are exhibited in sealed boxes inside sealed boxes and otherwise never shown to the filthy commoner public for reasons of ritual Shinto reverence imperial-court pecking-order yadda yadda. Here's Wikipedia's hive-mind of editors in their supernaturally-ignorant Ahrimanic innocence unwittingly retelling the typical coverup-murder-spree that apparently happens when someone has the chutzpah to look inside the nested boxes:
After witnessing the sword, the grand priest was banished and the other priests, except for Matsuoka, died from strange diseases. The above account therefore comes from the only survivor, Matsuoka.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusanagi_no_Tsurugi
Much like the story of Ahab and the White Whale, got to leave one survivor to tell the tale. Sheesh.
The things have ritual importance similar to the Stone of Scone to the British Crown, except that anyone can go to Edinburgh and see that the Stone of Scone is a rock that symbolizes Scotland. It has exactly the magical powers of a rock that symbolizes Scotland. But for the Japanese imperials, a number-one-priority when Japan lost WWII was to keep these particular treasures away from the Americans' otherwise-indiscriminate and understandable looting-spree. (When it came to regular historical artefacts and works of art, the Met and the Boston Museum of Fine Art and who knows what other museums in the USA ended up with very nice Japanese collections.)
There is more to this, because it seems illogical to retain secret Enochian magical artefacts that are waved around inside boxes at every coronation-ceremony in front of the entire planet, but perhaps history has evolved such that they were publically-known to exist for such a long time that 'hidden in plain sight' is the only strategy if they're still to be used at a coronation. The stories that they were 'lost' at one point, then suddenly miraculously not-lost, might be an abortive attempt to take them underground. My hypotheses: either they do not exist, or they really were 'lost' aka perhaps taken away and their powers are being used somewhere else for more exciting and useful things than sitting in a ritual-containment-box at coronations, or they have obvious visible design-features that would lead to exuberant weirdness if exhibited in public. For example, the scrying-mirror slash interstellar-video-chat-device slash whatever-it-is-they-desperately-don't-want-to-show-to-the-public 'Yata no Kagami' has been alleged by 'Lost Tribes of Israel' afficionados to be inscribed with the Tetragrammaton. Which safely brings us out of the insane realm of 'high-security Indiana Jones artefacts' and brings us to the relative sanity....
The Japanese Descend from a Lost Tribe of Israel: Hah, no way! There is a theory that the Japanese descend from a lost tribe of Israel, which always struck me as a theory 'striking, yet utterly inane'. It has some kind of evidence, I assume; these things usually do. But in its extant form, it is refuted thus: as far as I can tell Japanese do not resemble modern Jews, or any of the other Western nations said to descend from the Israelites, in any way shape or form. Neither in appearance nor temperament nor any particular striking details of culture. Yes, I tried repeatedly to squint at depictions and numerous worthy and excellent human exemplars of both cultures with my gaijin eyes as hard as I could. No resemblance. They both like to have things on paper, maybe. But beyond that, nope. Ok, but if....
The Japanese Descend from a Lost Tribe of IsraelZion: If we note that 'Ancient Israel' and 'Zion' are typically identified with each other, there is a hilarious and perhaps Providentially-intended mix-up in play, (at least up to now, because apparently now I have appeared on Earth to potentially blow their cover). Dreamers and seers investigating the ancestry of the Japanese symbolically or shamanically will get intuitively-plausible syncs about 'Japan' and 'Zion' and then search for evidence to concoct a decoy theory about Japan descending from Israelites who really got blown-off-course, rather than from Enochian Zion. Interestingly, the Mormons' theory that the Israelites ended up in America is geographically more plausible, but the Japan theory has slightly more memetic pull because every just likes the idea that much. The decoy works because only the Mormons have a notion of an off-planet 'Enochian Zion' that far-predates Israel and non-Mormons tend not to root around in obscure details of Mormon scripture. If unsympathetic non-Mormons (I refuse to employ the 'Gentile' slur) do read Mormon scripture, it's typically out of prurient curiosity about how wild the stuff about Old America might be.
They do have Mormons in Japan, so I wonder if I can find out what they think about Enochian Zion.
(As it happens, I did briefly meet one notable and famous Japanese Mormon during my trip. I told him to 'please take good care of me', which is a standard Japanese thing to say to people you expect to never encounter again. He told me to 'please enjoy Japan'. I do not assign any revelatory or synchronistic meanings to this exchange, which is the sum total of my encounter with Mormonism in Japan.)
The history and cultural impact of Tenjin / Sugawara no Michizane: consistent with Michizane being translated to immortality at a surprisingly late date in a relatively-public fashion. He was, by conventional accounts, a very quiet and studious poet and scholar at the imperial court, and not at all skilled in matters of courtly politics, and he was exiled by political enemies in 901 over some kind of political inanity, it looks significant and perhaps consequential but I have not parsed the nuances yet. Perhaps he wasn't just a nerd who got picked on, but that was my impression of him in 2019.
n contradiction to his rather mild personality, after his death in 903 there was a sequence of natural calamities and the imperial court became absolutely convinced that this political pushover in particular had ascended to become a God of Storms named Tenjin. (The granting of a different and much more on-the-nose name to humans at translation is another detail that has cropped up in my drafts and contemplations.) In apology for persecuting him during life, the imperial court fearfully , and the whole incident made such an impression that the number of shrines multiplied to the 10,000s present in Japan today, and for good measure the cross-walks in Kyushu and sometimes elsewhere-in-Japan are programmed today play the following cutesy children's rhyme to placate the guy, to the very day that I visited:
(starts at 13sec)
You may go in, you may enter
Which way is this narrow pathway?
This is the narrow pathway of the Tenjin shrine
Please allow me to go through
Those without good reason shall not pass
To celebrate the 7th birthday of this child
We've come to dedicate our offering [to offer our ofuda here]
Going in is easy, but returning is scary
It's scary, but
You may go in, You may pass through
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dryanse
Highlighting the nursery-rhyme: this is the type of thing worthy of some WmJas analysis. Syncs include 'narrow path' (obviously), the number 7, and the "going is easy but returning is scary/difficult". Ofuda bit reads to me as garbled by Wikipedia's choice of wording in the translation. I know enough Japanese to attempt to see if the kanji are doing anything sneaky. Kanji are tricky things.
As is known to perhaps some of the readership, children's nursery rhymes are Deep Magic, and in the modern era end up making up for a total lack of any meaningful or effective magic on the part of the adults. So this is worth paying attention to.
Returning to the middle ages where weird things were supposed to happen... having sufficiently avenged himself on the imperials, Tenjin very swiftly retires from the natural-calamity business and, if he makes any intercessions at all in the centuries since then, it's generally to console modern-day Japanese scholars who are overstressed with exam preparation.
Some miracles are attested prior to his apparent-death, e.g. the Tobiume plum-blossom tree which was miraculously relocated 100s of kilometres from the capital to Tenjin's place of exile. We can easily assume that Tenjin, perhaps on account of his poetic career, had managed to get the attention of patrons in the Enochian side of existence and when he was exiled they furtively replanted the tree on his behalf to console him, hoping no one would pay too much attention to the deed. Since he lived only two years in exile, his patrons may have been attempting to use him to influence imperial politics in some substantive manner, and he may have been translated to the terrestrial degree of glory sometime after the scheme failed, as a sort of apology for his career being ruined.
Having been to Dazaifu and seen the tree in question and inspected the shrine, I can definitely say there was a presence that drew me there, which resembles the aura of a house inhabited by a kind-professor sort of person. 'Narnia' readers might imagine a medieval-Japanese Professor Digory Kirke. The presence is clearly maintained by the daily round of laborious and rote pseudo-shamanic-rituals that Shinto tends to prefer enacting, and my expectation is that the presence would most likely fade if the shrine was abandoned and the rituals stopped. I spent a couple of hours contemplating the location in a 'shamanic' sense, then moved on to more touristy matters.
(Interestingly: in the 'Steelman' outline, Kubla-Khan is translated from a Japanese man, probably a Kyushu-jin from the same approximate area as where Tenjin was exiled, but modern-day. However, Kubla is not a poet or a scholar and does not give me the slightest degree of Digory-Kirke vibrations.)
My visit to the Dazaifu shrine was a very quiet experience, but one with a truly absurd weight of unexplained Destiny which I felt at the time, especially since I have absolutely no interest in Shinto as a 'religion' and I continue to have absolutely no interest in Shinto as a 'religion', and I maintained Christian discipline in not praying or making any gestures of obeisance to the enshrined deity. Since I was making residual efforts to be loyal to Russian Orthodoxy I felt torn by the feeling of Welcoming Import in this place. Flustered, I even forgot the ritual-purification (a brief and unobjectionable washing of the hands and mouth) considered necessary to enter the courtyard and just wandered in at first, although later I realized I should probably be polite to the ordinary decent human who is commemorated there and guiltily went back to wash my hands on the way out. Make of that what you will. The presence did not seem to 'mind' my odd behaviour in the slightest. Zero wrathful storm god vibes. Just an absent-minded university-graduate who forgot to wipe his feet when entering the house of an absent-minded professor. I bought a delicious ume-cha and rice-dumpling in a sort of restaurant-alley on the shrine grounds and ate it in a completely-empty restaurant, as if I'd been shown personal hospitality.
For control-purposes, my impression of the opulent shrine of the very recent Meiji emperor (Meiji Jingu) had a repellent 'Masonic' sort of vibration with a strangely-large number of votive tablets from Europeans, while the 17th century Tokugawa Ieyasu personage commemorated by the huge Toshogu line of shrines struck me a repellent-enough specimen of humanity that I specifically avoided shrines in his honour. He is apparently prayed-to by corporate drudges in search of promotion. How fitting. The 'deified' god-names attached to these individuals' supposed immortal forms smack of being carefully-chosen by a Committee, while the transformation of a shy poet into Tenjin strikes me as an example of the now-familiar Divine Sense of Cosmic Humour that strikes fear into insufficiently-enlightened mortals, and therefore I suspect the practice of building hundreds or thousands of shrines to government figures may be cargo-cult imitation of the events following Tenjin's ascension.
Unusually for a Japanese Shinto deity, Tenjin's votive-tablets at Dazaifu were in both Japanese and Korean writing in almost-equal numbers. As Koreans have a long-time historical enmity with the Japanese, this struck me as extremely unusual at the time, and left an unanswered question of why and when Tenjin had made an impression on Korea to the extent that they would pray to a deity of their enemy nation to this day. However, Kyushu is, ancestrally-speaking, a sort of middle-ground between Japan and Korea so perhaps it's not as weird as my outsider perspective made it out to be.
Okay, this is all very dignified and proper sort of shamanic investigation. Time for utter humiliation!
The tendency of Enochian culture to blend with anime in my imagination: this is extremely annoying because most anime is infuriatingly bad and the admixture of low-quality anime imagery lowers the fidelity of my imaginative vision of Zionic or of Renegade Enochians considerably. Except. There is one particular intuitive experience I had in Tokyo when I was in Akihabara on the way from point A to point B. I was not at all interested in Akihabara or modern herbivore-anime-cafe-culture -- I was interested in shrines, tea, coffee, ramen, history, and urbanism and prioritized my itinerary accordingly, but I figured I may as well route my walk through the stupid anime tourist-trap famous for the how-the-hell-is-this-legal Mario Kart eyesore go-karts speeding around, and check that tedious bit of tourism off my checklist with minimal-effort. I happened to do this early in the morning -- when the latter-day mortal Japanese engage in one of their societal-scale OCD customs of desperately rushing to make it to work at exactly 9am sharp.
Thus, I beheld a Symbolic Vision of Cosmic Importance roughly as-follows. {TODO: I'll have to check if I thought to take a photo that does the scene proper justice.} To the extent that I am apparently somehow doing Joseph Smith's unfinished homework centuries-later and on a low budget, we will dub this my Akihabara Grove Experience. In accordance to the era of Primary Thinking where responsibility for Navigation is firmly in mortal hands and hand-holding has been withdrawn, the Akihabara Grove Experience did not involve Glowing Personages or Direct Orders to Shun All Religion or any of that special-effects revelatory garbage that stuffs a prophet's Free Will into a sack and drops it in the ocean. It was a simple and amusing and kind of twee juxtaposition of two contrasting Realms presented very-clearly to my consciousness, and I was free to read into it what I will.
Below was a realm of the Mundane and Ordinary. It consisted of the Akihabara crosswalk with the OCD Japanese salarymen (mostly men, the women blending into the crowd) dressed in identical OCD black and white suits rushing, with the terrifying empty expressions that Japanese people wear in Japan, to fulfil the utterly absurd 9am Ahrimanic Obedisance. It was already decided by all the authorities long before that day, that people ought to stagger arrival-times at work to avoid straining the Tokyo train-system in the morning, but nothing was resulting from that decision. Prior to the even darker spell of the birdemic, 9am was like a reverse Cinderella-spell cast by Ahriman dragging every office-worker in that country to their unspeakably-dull 1930s-America-cosplay office-environment away from all the interesting Japanese things.
Above was a realm of the Fanciful and Exaggerated. It consisted of the visual cacaphony of all the Akihabara billboards and every billboard was anime girls. The anime girls were drawn with no artistically-interesting qualities, of course, shapes very stereotyped and unrealistic, but all of the billboards were extremely colourful. The creatures depicted thereupon struck me as more tropical parakeets than girls, to be honest. Most striking of course is the gratuitous fluorescently-coloured hair in every imaginable colour except that of actual hair as found on human beings on Earth. You might scrape together a miniscule handful of natural gingers who approach this level of fluorescence on the entire planet, and would certainly not be looking for them in Japan. The depiction of Japanese characters in lowbrow anime overcompensates to extreme lengths for the apparent East-Asian cultural complex about having hair in any colour as long as it's black.
I chose to read this incredibly striking image as a symbolic depiction of a dull and black-and-white mortal Earth down below (the salarymen) and a colourful and hilariously-feminine Paradise up above (the colourful anime girls). I took this as an amusing bit of cultural commentary about the decay of Japan that Providence had seen fit to throw my way with a wink and a nod to enliven an otherwise-dull gap in my itinerary -- Japanese live an utterly black-and-white Ahrimanic life and attempt to make up for it by depicting themselves in anime as cliques of nonexistent-but-colourful anime girls with cheerful and spontaneous contrasting personalities -- and nothing more.
Little-did-I-know.
I will expand on this horrifying 'anime' rabbit-hole in later posts, safely-interspersed among more-edifying material. In summary, the Japanese anime and manga producers of middling-talent appear to be OCD-fixated on repeating a number of -- extremely tedious to outsiders, and I suspect even to fans -- story-tropes that are explained away as wish-fulfilment for herbivore males the world over (not just in Japan) but do not resemble what a mortal herbivore male with a shred of sanity would actually wish to vicariously-experience according to my understanding. I would say I have a reasonable grasp of what a sociosexually-unlucky male is drawn to for wish-fulfilment entertainment, prurient or otherwise.
Of course, for the high-brow top-tier of anime, we have the high-octane Sehnsucht of Studio Ghibli. I do not know if I will have the chutzpah to untangle Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi in public anytime soon because it is a time-bomb of highly personal synchronicities, and just the process of contemplating it while adding a link in the blog post dislodged one more minor and one more major one. Incongruously for a movie with zero Christian elements, watching the movie triggered a personality change -- I had an extremely Ahrimanic computer-nerd false-personality prior to that, interested in idiotic things like quantum computers and transhuman brainwashing devices, most of those interests proceeded to gradually fall away over the next few years -- and kickstarted the process towards my Christian conversion.
Interestingly. I once wrote a comment on Bonald's blog {TODO: link}, in which I rather-idiotically and -randomly asserted that the Ghibli animation style replicates the physics of resurrection bodies. The proportions are obviously not realistic, but the way things move strikes a chord. For example, characters' hair will stand on end in a biologically-impossible fashion whenever they are startled or experience strong emotion; mouths tend to open to such an absurd elastic extent that you see the back teeth -- for some reason I intuitively-felt these, and others, are real details observed from somewhere, rather than the more-typical 'construction' physics taught in Western animation-textbooks where a cartoon-character is a puppet made of elastic ovoids glommed onto each other. I was struck by how the animators make all these monstrous-sounding exaggerations look natural and good. This is certainly not true of lazy regular Japanese animation. Note that at the time, I did not have a mental category for translated terrestrial body that sits in-between mortal body and resurrection body.
Ok, this is going down an even bigger rabbit-hole and I really must wrap up.
* * *
Intellectual counter-points and doubts:
Enoch's Zion was founded from a singular Earth (the proper-Earth that reached maximum iniquity among all the worlds in the bad old days, and was therefore chosen for the Incarnation and Christ's victory over Evil), while Japanese culture is apparently echoed across many parallel Earths in extensive detail. That certainly includes Shinto. This is another instance of the apparent 'singular crucifixion / many Christian worlds' paradox, and could be Mandala Effect copying Shinto beliefs across universes, but whereas faith in the Name of Christ and perhaps a furtive cross-dimensional trip or an open post-Resurrection ministry to transfer apostolic charism suffices to establish Christianity on a planet or continent, in these posts we are talking about physical lineage from far-past Enochians. However, I do not have a definite memory of whether the Shinto gods of other-Earth Japan (that is, the other-Earth I have apparent evidence of) are the same pantheon or a completely different set of beings with different names that follow the same cultural rules. The latter is perfectly possible.
As I cover Finland and Vainamoinen, we will find a common theme emerging that particular Enochians contributed to repairing and terra-forming the Earth after the Deluge. We must cover English Albion and Mormon-adjacent America as entirely-separate cases, though I really dread having to dig for the national ancestry of striking figures like Joseph Smith and Philip K Dick. Another item in the list of cultures is Navajo, of all things: they have a very interesting deluge-myth that struck my imagination a while back. Honestly, any culture that has a mythology where supernatural deities or demi-gods descend into a vast watery area and do anything that remotely-resembles terra-forming should go on the list to analyze. Suggestions welcome.
