A Phenomenal Recognition
It has come to our attention a certain series of articles being published, relating the supposed efficacy of Studio Ghibli films having a positive psychological effect on its viewers, increasing their happiness and affirming their struggles through the experience of the films’ respective narratives. As someone who has studied Psychology in an earlier time in their life, I’ve come to a firm recognition that any so-called “applied science”, of which psychology participates in, only scratches the surface with regards to the phenomena of the mind, heavily relying on the statistical modelling that is a particular fascination of the moderns, which of course is compounded by Data Science and predictive AI algorithms in more recent times (see Rene Guenon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Ch. 10 “The Illusion of Statistics”). So, the phenomenon of the positive effects of Studio Ghibli’s works is notable, but the study has no deep recognition as to why the situation is as it is. We think that we can contribute meaningfully to this discussion by explaining the spiritual significance of what many of the Studio Ghibli films participate in, due to their heavy Traditional influence and sense of the esoteric, given that their films must appeal universally (metaphysically?) to an international audience, which not only explains their success in the art of film but its positive psychological influence.
This brings us to the film Spirited Away, a work of deep significance, of which the overwhelming mass of “critics” agree, and audiences as well, though one wonders if the level of depth that the work possesses is appreciated by all. If the reader has not watched to movie up to this point in their life, I heavily recommend watching it for oneself to appreciate the movie from one’s own perspective first, for one can only watch a movie for the first time once. The first time I watched it I was only a boy, transfixed by an animation so crisp, so ethereal in beauty, and a story so fantastical that it seems beyond the realm of the possible. As a man, knowing the things I know now, the story is not an allegory or fairy tale, as some may very well claim, but it is literal in its narrative, with regards to the reality of the events presented in the story. A knowledge of ontological reality, Traditional Metaphysics, esotericism, as well as the Shinto Tradition, are prerequisites to appreciate the fullness of the truths contained herein. So, let us assess the necessary information to appreciate the journey that is Spirited Away.
A Tradition Being Forgotten - Shintoism and Japan
The film opens up on Chihiro (千尋, translated as “a thousand fathoms” or “very deep”), (please note, names are very important in this film - as they are in real life as well - a fact which will be important later), in the back of the family car, a Western make and model, based off its look, sentimentally looking at the flowers and goodbye card she received from leaving her previous school, while her father, a slightly overweight man with a strong sense of over-confidence, drives, and her mother, a prim, fashionable, and slim woman who is decidedly passive, in the passenger seat. The narrative begins with a sense of departure, longing, and a sense of loss. The unfamiliarity of being in a new place and trying to find their home gives the air of aimlessness and a poor sense of direction, which works for the narrative for two reasons: 1) not only are the family themselves lost without a sense of place, but 2) Japanese society as a whole, as a consequence of its participation in modernity, is also lost its sense of place, especially with its abandonment of Tradition through gradual forgetting, a notion we will develop here (see Rene Guenon’s Crisis of the Modern World, Ch. 1 “The Dark Age”, as well as the whole of East and West).
On the way to meet the movers at the house, the father, taking a wrong turn, can’t find their home, while their mother, seeing the house from afar, prompts the father to decide on taking a shortcut upwards to get there, which brings the family in the car down a cobblestone road into a forested enclave. Chihiro notes the hokura, “receptacle of kami (spirits)” (for the ensouling of spirits into statues, see Corpus Hermeticum on the ritual of the “opening of the mouth”), on the side of the road, and her mother says that “people think little spirits live there”, which betrays a sense of disbelief in the spiritual nature of her own homeland, a decidedly modern perspective. It should also be noted that not only is their car Western but their clothes and attitudes are as well. They arrive the threshold of a larger structure and the father decides to go into the tunnel to see what’s on the other side and the mother easily complies, though Chihiro intuitively feels the danger inherent in the strange experience, possibly knowing that curiosity can lead one to disastrous consequences, a decidedly Traditional notion, as God does not suffer experimentation. The Dōsojin statue guarding the threshold stands mute, its dual faces separating the barrier between the human and spirit world, and it even evokes the symbology of the Janus mask, the separation between past and future (the secret third face of the present, unseen yet always manifest). Still, Chihiro follows her parents and passes through the tunnel.
An empty room, dilapidated and vacant, enhances the feeling of departure, which they quickly pass to find an open field, the wind blowing with a less than tranquil intensity, the same wind that seemed to pull them into the tunnel earlier (the spirit often being connoted with the element of Air). The father had previously noted that the facade of the structure was made of plaster and notes that the structure was likely an abandoned theme park, and that after “the economy went bad, they all went bankrupt”.
To put this narrative into the context of history, following the isolation of the Tokugawa Shogunate, in which Japan preserved its Traditions, even at the detriment of Christians that wanted to convert the Japanese (a phenomena worth consideration in itself), the Americans via Commodore Perry forced the Japanese into trade and into opening up to the world once more. With this recognition, Japan was faced with a trilemma of major choices:
1) refuse and implicitly be crushed by Western force,
2) accept and refuse to adapt, falling in the same fashion as China after the disastrous Opium Wars, or
3) accept and adapt, taking on Western innovations of Industrialization and engage in the Imperialism of the age.
History shows, of course, that this resulted in the Meiji Restoration, in which Japan quickly adapted, taking whatever knowledge and technology they could from Westerners (even German brewing techniques, as evidenced by Sapporo brand beer), which chiefly involved industrial factory production and weapons of war. This allowed the Japanese to quickly expand as an Imperial force, just as capitalism in general allows for a large speculative expansion, up to the point where it led to their desolation and loss against the Americans in World War II, just as the depression, “the Lost Decade” of 90’s Japan, upended their economy and the various theme parks by association. By participating in modernity, Japan lost much in the exchange, and the want for the material and for money tainted their Traditional way of life, all to bring about the Japan that we have today - a society in decay that is progressively dying from the inside out. Demographers have noted that in the year of 2024 that Japan has lost 1 million people in one year due to its demographic collapse, exacerbated by issues of work-life balance, corporate culture, decadence, and spiritual crisis. It is a Faustian Bargain playing out in real time, but the writing was on the wall a long time ago, yet the downward tendency pulls it further, just as the wind pulled Chihiro through the tunnel and beyond to what lies on the other side.
Movement Between Worlds and Ontology
The family continues on, ignoring the other Dōsojin and come to cross a river, perhaps symbolic of a boundary between their world and the one beyond. They come to find a semblance of a town that’s all restaurants, reflective of the modern aspect of consumerism first and foremost, as well as a place of transience and quick money, a true “tourist-trap”. On the street in this town, the father smells food from afar and comes to one of the establishments, with incredibly enticing food on display. The father and mother give into their appetites and begin to voraciously gorge themselves, even without ordering or paying, the father trying his best to assuage the disapproving Chihiro by stating that he has “credit cards and cash”, further cementing the consumerist modern mindset, as if money could truly take one anywhere beyond the purely physical (and at what cost?). Chihiro runs away to find the Bathhouse, a location central to the film, yet another place of commerce and transience, with the train passing under the bridge to introduce the character Haku (白, translated as “amber”), though his name is not revealed until several more minutes in. Haku warns Chihiro that she “shouldn’t be here”, but its too late - the lamps are lit and the separation between the worlds in complete, with Haku distracting any onlookers from Chihiro’s presence through one of his many acts of magic.
This brings us to an ontological discussion. It must first be noted that there are 8 Ontological Levels of Existence (not to be confused with Creation), which are listed as follows:
Source of Divine Emanation - Unconditioned Existence
The Creator God and Godhead
The Domain of Pure Intellect
The Realm of Upper Celestial Hierarchies / Eternal Ideals
Angels/Divine Messengers
The Collective Consciousness
Subtle Manifestation
Gross Manifestation
Levels 1 and 2 are that which comprise Beyond Being, which, being the source of all manifestation, are beyond all conception of knowledge (see our previous article “Solitaire, Tarot, and the Three Dark Nights of the Soul”). Levels 3 and 4 are what comprise the domain of the Spirit, with Pure Intellect being the means by which one achieves the steps up the rungs of the proverbial Jacob’s Ladder, whereas Shintoists would refer to this as the “Great Chain of Being”, while the Upper Celestial Hierarchies would include the perfect, eternal beings that carry out God’s necessary functions, reflective of aspects of the Divine, i.e. “names of God”, which are related to the conceptualization that is the Platonic Theory of Forms, which we will return to later.
Levels 5 and 6 consist of the Psychic domain, with angels communicating (angel = “messenger”) to those below what is due to them, often under the guise of the Guardian Angel, of which everyone possesses from the Christian point of view (Kant understood this ontological process as the Categorical Imperative). The Collective Consciousness, meanwhile, is the fullness of the psychic experiences present in all of manifestation, which people can find various spiritually dangerous methods to engage with and make the proverbial march to “take heaven by storm”.
This brings us to Levels 7 and 8 of the Physical, which are the ontological levels in which this movie participates. Level 7 is Subtle Manifestation, which is where subtle spirits exist, which can be termed by all manner of names and modes: nature spirits, demons, djinn, tulpas/egregores and so on (see the difference between fallen angels and created demons in Meditations on the Tarot, “XIII - The Devil”). This subtle manifestation is part physical and part psychic, as a means of an intermediary between the two, which explains why subtle spirits have the ability to shapeshift to suit their appearances, and how they can move at speeds that defy conventional laws of physics (see Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future by Fr. Seraphim Rose, as well as Cracks in the Great Wall: UFOs and Traditional Metaphysics, for such discussions, as well as for the topic of “aliens” really being demons).
Subtle Spirits are referred to in the Bible as “powers of the air” (Eph. 2:2) in their demonic mode, along with their prince, who is none other than the prince of this world - Satan himself. It should be noted that, however, the Shinto Tradition, just like Islam, do not consider all subtle spirits to be dangerous, and that relationships with kami allow for pathways upward and to achieve greater states of Being in the Great Chain of Being. Meanwhile, in Islam, it is noted in the Qur’an in Surah Al-Jinn (72:11): “And among us [djinn] are the righteous, and among us are [others] not so; we are [divided into] factions differing [in way]”, which is to say that some djinn serve Allah but others do not.
Level 8 is simply the world where we exist in, which is where Chihiro moves our of and moves into the Subtle Plane of existence at Level 7, at this point of the film. Soon after, her character begins to fade away and become translucent, which is reflective of the dangers of astral projection, when the psychic and spiritual body separate from the physical body (see Hindu doctrine of “envelopes” or 5 Sheaths, i.e. Pancha Koshas), which cannot be permitted for too long, though Chihiro is given food by Haku to prevent fading away, despite Chihiro’s fear of the food due to what happened to her parents, which brings us to our next digression.
Essence and Substance - Simplicity and Complexity
Directly after leaving Haku the first time, Chihiro goes to find her parents, only to see, to her horror and disbelief, that they have transformed into pigs, due to their transgression of eating the food of the spirits, in which the need to save her parents becomes the focus driving Chihiro’s story forward from this point onward. This occurrence is reflective of the bestial nature of man in which the vices are unchecked, which lessen man to a lower state of being (similar to the Odyssey, Book X, when Circe turns Odysseus’s sailors into pigs through wine and promises of leisure), so it is no surprise why pigs become a universal symbol for a lesser potentiality of man, the same function which monkeys also serve to show involution downward (“Satan is the ape of God” as quoted from City of God by St. Augustine), compared to the evolution of higher animality evident in the dog (man’s best friend, just as man is the companion of God) and, even higher, the symbol of the sphinx, which is the perfect union between divine intellect and the bestial nature of man (see Meditations on the Tarot, “X - The Wheel of Fortune”). Their essence is lessened by their participation in vice, since vice is the absence of virtue, and they participate in a lower state of being by association.
It should also be noted in passing that, at this point of the story, Haku tells Chihiro that he knows her name because he supposedly met her and knew her when she was “very small”, though the fullness of this revelation is not yet revealed, and Chihiro is then instructed to go down to meet the “boiler man” to seek getting a job, and she then descends the side stairs to the bottom of the tower.
This participation in different aspects of essence brings us back to the aforementioned Platonic Theory of Forms. The various kami in the film have multifarious forms, either as specialized nature spirits (“Radish Spirit”), elemental nature spirits (“River Spirit”), and many other types of kami from Japanese folklore, including, but not limited to tsuchigumo of which Kamaji (カマ爺, “old boiler man”) is reflective of, which is supposedly derived from the term tuchigomori (土隠, “those that hide in the ground”) and is fitting given his hidden influence at the root of the tower where the coal and fires reside that power the bathhouse, heating the water and adding various substances with the grinding of the mill stone. The main workers of the bathhouse, however, are a mixture of humanoid-like kami, many with larger and exaggerated features, some being more human and others being more frog-like, while some kami look almost like frogs themselves. All of this to say that each of these kami participate in various different forms and in different quantities of essence, since, of course, being part of the physical domain, quantity is a factor that differentiates manifestation, and all things in the physical are a mixture of quality (essence) and quantity (substance). Those that have lesser forms (frog people and frog hominids) are reflective of a varying degrees of essence, either in greater or lesser intellect, or due to a lack of certain virtues that predispose to a veritable “spiritual gigantism” which cause disproportionate features, a topic we will return to shortly (see Vectors of the Counter-Initiation by Charles Upton).
One of the only kami with proper human form and proportion is the character Lin (Rin リン, which could be reflective of the thousandth part of the yen, an infinitesimally small portion, which may be an ironic choice, as the character is invaluable inside the context of the narrative), who helps Chihiro learn the bathhouse when she begins working there. Chihiro first tries to get a job with Kamaji, but she can’t take the jobs from the soot gremlins, because, as Kamaji notes, if the gremlins don’t work they “turn back into soot”, which reflects the importance of labor in cultivating virtue (or essence, which establishes presence), and that, if one does not work one does not live (“If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat”, 2 Thess. 3:10, as well as the Works and Days of Hesiod, with regards to the law of the Iron Age, which we currently are under the yoke of). However, Chihiro must go up to Yubaba (湯婆婆, “old hot-water woman”) the witch that runs the bathhouse, that no doubt engages in her own personal magic of a non-divine orientation and purpose (see Meditations on the Tarot, “III - The Empress” for Divine Magic, i.e. White Magic, versus Personal Magic, i.e. Black or “Grey” Magic). Meanwhile, No-Face (顔無し) looms in the background, which we will have to consider in more depth later, though he too seems to lack much essence and substance, ethereal and dark, phasing in and out of sight.
However, before we get to considerations on Yubaba, and the presentation of the Bathhouse itself, we must note another dimension to ontological manifestation: Divine Simplicity vs. Luciferian Complexity. The highest ontological levels, though more refined and pure, are also more simple, the idea of Divine Simplicity most evident in Islam, especially in Sufism. Conversely, as the movement of manifestation goes downward, things become more defined, from the eternal and perfect beings in domain of the Spirit, to the long-lived psychic and subtle beings (the Qur’an relates that the djinn are not only long-living, with Iblis (Lucifer) asking for a reprieve until the day of judgement in his fallen form, but they are also born and die, and they even occupy physical spaces, which anyone familiar with the phenomenon or concept of demonic possession and oppression should be aware of), all the way to physical beings subject to the greatest complexity and change in the domain of becoming. The pathway downward leads to an increased level of what can be referred to as “enfoldment” and “crystallization” into a more mineral character (see Meditations on the Tarot, “XIII - Death”), which is more complex and complicated the deeper one goes, and anyone interested in particle physics and some aspects of the physical sciences would probably agree.
So, if Simplicity is Divine, then Complexity must be of a Luciferian persuasion conversely, especially since the symbol associated with Satan is the serpent, like in Genesis, with its various folds, scales, skins, coiled form and cold, calculating nature. Though simple from an evolutionary standpoint, they’re reflective of the esoteric symbology that is outlined here from a purely metaphysical point of view. This same phenomenon is evident especially in circuit boards and microchips, progressively getting smaller and more complex as time goes on, actuating the potential for malefic influence evident in metals, a modern-age talisman of infra-human influences but without the proper Traditional knowledge, which is a topic that we may return to at another time. Metals and caves in many Traditional stories are noted to be reflective of demonic influence, like in 1001 Arabian Nights with the story of “Aladdin” and the Cave of Wonders having treasures underground guarded by Djinn, just like Peer Gynt with the Mountain King and goblins in his great hall, with other Traditional stories involving giants and gnomes (don’t forget subtle spirits can manipulate their shape and size) hewing stone and metal underground, and reflective of a lower order of knowledge. It should be noted here that the frog-like kami are analogous to this lower aspect of the serpent, reflecting their own lower state.
One last note on this dimension and we shall move on. In scripture, the Lord tells us: “Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16). To actuate the Lord’s will, we must be complex and mind and simple with regards to innocence, which reflect the state of affairs at higher ontological states. Meanwhile, Satan would rather us be “as wise as doves and as innocent as serpents”, which is to say simple in mind, in the negativistic sense of the word, and lack all sense of innocence and move towards complex corruptions and vices, which is the perfect disposition towards perdition. What could be more reflective of the low cunning and mental simplicity than man in his purely bestial mode? There is a lesson in there somewhere.