VICTORY

I like a religion where anybody can walk right in to the establishment and in a good, open, non-infidel spirit buy one of the talismans-- in this case a "Victory" (in whatever may be your endeavor) omamori.

I could in this instance have bought instead a Hello Kitty general purpose talisman (photo a few posts below), butI don't really have any cartoonish aims, or objectives whose achievement could reasonably hinge on minimalist cat depictions.

I saw the Victory ones and I thought yeah, this red one on white is for me, this fits how I trust in the basic premise that religious hierarchy has coopted over the millennia, the original spiritual understanding that if you will it and keep it in mind it will come to pass, the automystery "magic," that is your own, that is born in you and that you should never surrender to another...

If you have with you at all times something to constantly and subtly remind you, preferably in a beautiful way, of your wish to be, for example, victorious in your honorable endeavors (forget about taking the thing to Vegas or winning the lottery with it, these things work from the inside, not from the outside) then keep this on or about you at all times, let it interrupt you, let get in your way, let it redirect your wandering thoughts, let it re-mind you of the summit of yourself, until one day you arrive there...

IT'S OFFICIAL...

Hello Kitty is now a Shinto deity.

Spotted these Hello Kitty general-purpose omamori at Tarobo (one of Japan's top 10 most beautiful shrines, especially on a day like yesterday; will post of it anon) and they were selling like treacle-covered hotcakes for about twice the price of omamori bearing the conventional blessings of the standard old gods of no brand name, who never made it in show biz or hung around Cameron Diaz...

As I took some pictures in light of my disbelief, one of the shrine clerks said Look! The foreigner is taking pictures of the Hello Kitty omamori! (No one takes pictures of such everyday items as omamori.) Another clerk responded Of course! Because Hello Kitty is so cute! Little did they know my true reason or my opinion of Hello Kitty, the embodiment of cuteness as vapor in a desert. To say nothing of sacrosanctity.

Is nothing sacred? I mean is everything sacred? Sure, you could say, after a few hits of whatever, that everything is sacred, but... EVERYTHING? Then nothing is. The older gods, with millennia of experience under their obi, must be very upset. Look for problems ahead in Japan-- big problems, of oddly indefinite origin, emanating - sort of - from a sacred mountain... If anything is sacred...