Carmen Blacker was an outstanding scholar of Japanese culture, known internationally for her writings on religion, myth and folklore – her most notable work being The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan. Importantly, a third of the volume comprises significant extracts from the author’s diaries covering a period of more than forty years, together with a plate section drawn from her extensive photographic archive, thus providing a rare opportunity to gain a personal insig...

This volume of the Collected Writings of Modern Western Scholars on Japan brings together the work of Carmen Blacker, who wrote extensively on religion, myth and folklore.

This classic work describes shamanic figures surviving in Japan today, their initiatory dreams, ascetic practices, the supernatural beings with whom they communicate, and the geography of the other world in myth and legend.

In Ancient Cosmologies (1975) nine eminent scholars seek to answer the question, what was the shape of the universe imagined by those ancient peoples to whom all modern knowledge of geography and astronomy was inaccessible? How did the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Jews, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Greeks and Norsemen conceive the form of the cosmos which accommodated not only the known face of the earth and the visible heavenly bodies but also those other worlds which it was deeme...

First published in 1981, Divination and Oracles analyses the religious practices of the ancient world as they have been witnessed from Scandinavia to Tibet and Japan, from the third millennium BC until the present day. Divination and the consultation of oracles formed part of the religious practice of the ancient world and are part of the living folklore of the contemporary societies. They are subjects that are of immediate concern to anthropologists and not infrequently to the hi...