Gadget Blessings: Shinto Priest Protects Electronics From Bad Mojo
Japan's Shinto religion holds that nearly every object in the world, animate or inanimate, has a spiritual essence. Therefore, anything can be blessed, from a newborn child to an automobile. Priests at the Kanda Shrine, which overlooks Akihabara—Tokyo's mecca for consumer electronics—offer prayers for the well-being of gadgets.
In the game I play, the Gifts of the Glass Walkers and other tribes from this system have been incorporated as a system of witchcraft among humans, not werewolves. In the Werewolf system, the spirits are seen to be in all things. Most tribes deal with spirits of the Wyld, that of nature. The Glass Walkers see the spirits of the Weaver--of which technology is a part--as being a part of creation and tend to interact with them, unlike their brethren, at least as I understand the game. One of the characters in our game has a cell phone that was given to her by the Glass Walkers whose inner spirit makes sure that calls are never dropped, service never falters, that it cannot be tracked, etc. The author in the article above has had tremendously bad luck with cell phones either going dead or disappearing, and has his blessed by the Shinto priests, who believe in a cell phone's spirit. After the blessing, he has gone several months without problems. Maybe there is some truth in fiction. Maybe the creators of Werewolf were incorporating principles of Shinto, I don't know. But I was struck by the similarities.
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