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The Two Days a Whole Nation Is Purified at Once

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The Two Days a Whole Nation Is Purified at Once

Article one describes harae chiefly at the scale of the individual worshipper, misogi at a shrine trough, the priest's wand passed over a small gathering. Twice each year Shinto performs the same purification at a considerably larger scale, treating an entire community's accumulated pollution as something to be cleared in a single coordinated national rite.

The Oharae, Great Purification, is held at the end of the sixth month, called Nagoshi no Harae, and again at the end of the twelfth, and its most distinctive instrument is the katashiro, a small paper or cloth effigy cut roughly in human shape. Worshippers rub the katashiro against their own bodies, or breathe on it, transferring their accumulated kegare into the object, which is then burned, buried or set adrift on water, carrying the pollution away with it rather than merely washing it off in place. At many shrines the June rite also includes passing through a large ring woven from chigaya reeds, the chinowa, in a prescribed figure that is itself believed to purify whoever walks through it.

The national, calendrical scale of the Oharae is worth setting beside the individual acts of misogi article one describes, because it treats pollution as something that accumulates collectively over a fixed half-year period regardless of individual conduct, requiring periodic communal clearing whether or not any particular person has done anything wrong, which is consistent with article one's own point that kegare is a condition rather than a moral fault. A society can be due for purification on the calendar in the same way a person can be due for it after contact with death, and the Oharae is the ritual answer to the first case rather than the second.

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