IncenseSakeRiceSaltA drum struck onceSilence at the first thunder
Invocation Approach
Tone
Loud abrupt immediate
Address
RaijinRaidenKaminari-samaThunder God
Relationship
The sound that arrives before you have decided anything
Warning
He is the strike and the warning is the light that comes first
Resonance
Those who need a thing ended farmers those keeping an oath
Symbols
Drum ringDrumsticksThe cloudThe oni faceThe thunderboltThe kaminari gate
Mythology Summary
Raijin is the thunder of Japanese art and popular religion, the red demon with a ring of drums who rolls across the sky; the Kojiki already knows eight thunder kami born from Izanami's body in Yomi, and the later figure owes much to the Chinese thunder god Leigong, from whom the drum ring and the drumsticks come. He is fixed in the Japanese imagination by the thirteenth-century guardian statues at Sanjusangendo in Kyoto and by the wind-and-thunder pair at temple gates such as Senso-ji's Kaminarimon. Thunder in Japan is kaminari, the sound of the kami, and he is that sound given a body.
Modern Practice
He has no large independent cult, though thunder shrines stand where lightning has struck. The practice is small and immediate: salt, sake and rice at the first thunder of the year, a drum struck once, and the honest recognition that what he brings is the ending of a thing rather than a negotiation about it.