Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Kobayakawa Takakage debating with the Tengu of Mount Hiko - Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 19th century. The encounter between a great warrior and the mountain spirit that tests him: the Tengu as adversary, judge, and ultimately as the supreme teacher of martial wisdom and spiritual power. In the high mountains of Japan - the cloud-wrapped peaks where Buddhist hermits built their retreats and Shinto shrines clung to cliff faces, where the air was cold and thin and the distance from the ordinary human world was measurable in more than meters - something lived that was not a god, not a demon, not a human being, and not quite any of these. It had the wings of a great bird, the face of a crow or an enormously long-nosed man depending on how it chose to appear, the temperament of a supreme master who has been offended, and the power to teach - or to destroy - anyone who entered its domain. The Tengu ( , literally "heavenly dog," though the connection to dogs is more etymol...

The word ukiyo-e means "pictures of the floating world" — the world of pleasure, theater, and fashionable life in the cities of Edo-period Japan (1603-1868). But the term is misleading if it suggests the merely decorative. The woodblock print tradition of Japan produced, in its two and a half centuries of production, not only the genre scenes of actors and courtesans for which it is best known, but a complete visual encyclopedia of Japanese sacred mythology, natural philosophy, and cosmic imagination. Hokusai's Great Wave — the most reproduced artwork in history — is not a landscape. It is a meditation on the relationship between the human (the tiny fishing boats beneath the wave) and the cosmic (the wave itself, and behind it, the eternal stillness of Mount Fuji). Kuniyoshi's supernatural scenes — demons, ghosts, warrior heroes battling giant skeletons — encode the Shinto and Buddhist understanding of a world populated by spirits at every level of existence. Hiroshi...