are

liturgical Liturgy is the customary public ritual of worship performed by a religious group. ''Liturgy'' can also be used to refer specifically to public worship by Christians. As a religious phenomenon, liturgy represents a communal response to and partic ...

texts or ritual incantations in

Shinto Shinto () is a religion from Japan. Classified as an East Asian religion by scholars of religion, its practitioners often regard it as Japan's indigenous religion and as a nature religion. Scholars sometimes call its practitioners ''Shintois ...

, usually addressed to a given ''

kami are the deities, divinities, spirits, phenomena or "holy powers", that are venerated in the Shinto religion. They can be elements of the landscape, forces of nature, or beings and the qualities that these beings express; they can also be the sp ...

''.

History

The first written documentation of ''norito'' dates to 712 CE in the ''

Kojiki The , also sometimes read as or , is an early Japanese chronicle of myths, legends, hymns, genealogies, oral traditions, and semi-historical accounts down to 641 concerning the origin of the Japanese archipelago, the , and the Japanese imperia ...

'' and 720 CE in the '' Nihongi''. The

Engishiki The is a Japanese book about laws and customs. The major part of the writing was completed in 927. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005)"''Engi-shiki''"in ''Japan Encyclopedia'', p. 178. History In 905, Emperor Daigo ordered the compilation of th ...

, a compilation of laws and minute regulation presented by the court compiled in 927 CE, preserves twenty-seven representative forms of ''norito''.

Etymology

There is no single universally accepted theory to explain the meaning of the term.Philippi (1990). p. 2. One theory derives ''norito'' from ''noru'' ( 宣る, 'to declare'; cf. the verbs '' inoru'' 'to pray' and '' norou'' 'to curse') - combined with the suffix ''-to''. A variant term, ''notto'', is derived from a combination of ''norito'' with ''koto'', 'word'. There are various known ways of writing the word in

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

: aside from 祝詞 (currently the standard), 詔戸言, 詔刀言, and 諄辞 are also attested. One recent writer summed up the original meaning of ''norito'' as "a general term meaning magic by means of words."

Form and content

The Shinto religion did not produce any writings, particularly those that inferred from myths and legends, that would have constituted a religious theology except for the norito. (One should, however, note that the

and the Nihongi, while written primarily as historical works rather than sacred scriptures, do contain mythical narratives of the Shinto tradition.) These few prayers were primarily used in purification rituals and articulated gratitude towards the gods for the blessings of ''kami'' or to ask for climate change such as rain. Norito is a form of a rhythmic

poem Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in ...

recited to facilitate the transmission of posterity. The incantation would usually begin with praises for the supreme power of ''kami'' and concludes with an expression of respect and awe. The ''Nakatomi no Harae Kunge'' or the ''Exposition of the Ritual of Purification'' describes norito within a process that implies the idea of human beings as children of the ''kami'' who lost their purity but who return to their

divine Divinity or the divine are things that are either related to, devoted to, or proceeding from a deity.divine< ...

origin by restoring it.

Reading

''Norito'' were (and still are) traditionally written in a variety of ''

man'yōgana is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. It was the first known kana system to be developed as a means to represent the Japanese language phonetically. The date of the earliest usage of this ...

'' where

particles In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...

and suffixes are written in a smaller script than the main body of the text. This style of writing, used in imperial edicts (宣命 ''senmyō'') preserved in the '' Shoku Nihongi'' and other texts dating from the 8th century (

Nara period The of the history of Japan covers the years from CE 710 to 794. Empress Genmei established the capital of Heijō-kyō (present-day Nara). Except for a five-year period (740–745), when the capital was briefly moved again, it remained the cap ...

), is known as ''senmyōgaki''.

References

{{Authority control Shinto terminology Language and mysticism Shinto in Japan

History

Etymology

Form and content

Reading

See also

References