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The Shugen Ichijitsu Reisō Shintō mikki is an origin account for a religious lineage constructed at Mount Togakushi (present-day Nagano Prefecture) in the early eighteenth century. In addition to providing a fascinating glimpse into thought, practice, and politics at this site at the time, the account offers a lucid example of four contingent features of religious culture in early modern Japan. The first, and well-known among scholars, is the hybrid nature of religious life before the Meiji era, evident in the text's indulgent synthesis of Shinto, Shugendō, and Buddhism. At a time when nativist (kokugaku) doctrines were on the rise, this work reveals that combinatory discourse remained alive and well. Second is the rapid growth of Shinto and Shugendō into new regions during the Edo period—a geographical development that belies modern, nation-centered assumptions about either. Third, this spread was enabled through site-based narratives that wove imported trends into local histories, thereby legitimizing their presence at these new places. Finally, such narratives reflect a growing appetite among the lay public to visit and mingle with the intoxicating mix of gods, mythological imprints, and legendary figures reported in them.

This dissertation considers two intersecting aspects of premodern Japanese religions: the development of mountain-based religious systems and the formation of numinous sites. The first aspect focuses in particular on the historical emergence of a mountain religious school in Japan known as Shugendō. While previous scholarship often categorizes Shugendō as a form of folk religion, this designation tends to situate the school in overly broad terms that neglect its historical and regional stages of formation. In contrast, this project examines Shugendō through the investigation of a single site. Through a close reading of textual, epigraphical, and visual sources from Mt. Togakushi (in present-day Nagano Ken), I trace the development of Shugendō and other religious trends from roughly the thirteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries. This study further differs from previous research insofar as it analyzes Shugendō as a concrete system of practices, doctrines, members, institutions, and identities. By identifying a constituency of these elements, we can determine the historical and regional contexts in which Shugendō became a self-conscious school. This approach, furthermore, clarifies the interests--religious, social, economic and institutional--that guided the school's formation.The second objective of this project concerns the role of place in the formation of Shugendō and other religious systems. It addresses the processes through which ritual, thought and religious identity are transmitted and adapted to specific places. To this end, I consider two other significant entities that overlapped with Shugendō at the site: Togakushi's central deity, Kuzuryū (literally, the "nine-headed dragon"), as well as the administrative and ideological contributions of the eighteenth-century cleric, Jōin. The chapter on Kuzuryū explores how an abstract deity from esoteric rituals and Lotus Sūtra narratives in Tang China comes to reside at Togakushi. Through an investigation of its development over time, I consider how its presence adds to the identity and numinous power of the mountain. The final two chapters analyze Jōin's treatment of Shugendō as well as his attempt to construct a new religious school that coalesced around the mountain's practices, history, and identity. Investigation of these concomitant developments at Togakushi reveals a twofold process. As rituals, doctrines and deities gained regional traction, religious participants rewrote the site's historical narratives, developed new identities, and situated divine elements into the landscape. I suggest that these modes of importation and domestication over time guide the construction of numinous places like Togakushi. On a broader scale, we might understand this continual adaptation of translocal trends to a specific locale as a defining element in the formation of overarching religious systems in premodern Japan.