Kegare as a Condition, Not a Verdict

Shinto organizes access to the kami around a state called kegare, ritual impurity or defilement, and its opposite, the cleanness that purification restores. Kegare is deliberately not a moral category: contact with death, childbirth, disease, menstrual blood or other bodily conditions can all bring it on, none of them involving any wrongdoing by the person affected, and Shinto teaching is explicit that the state passes no judgment on anyone who carries it. What kegare does is bar approach to the kami until it lifts, since the shrine space and the ritual encounter with the kami require a state Shinto calls kiyome, purity, that impurity temporarily suspends rather than permanently forfeits. Two rites restore it. Misogi is purification by water, traditionally standing beneath a waterfall or submerging fully in a river or the sea, echoing the mythic account of the god Izanagi purifying himself in a river after returning from the land of the dead. Harae is the broader term for ritual purification generally, covering everything from a priest's simple prayer and a wand waved over worshippers to salt scattered at a doorway to a mass purification performed for an entire community, and either misogi or harae can lift the state kegare represents and restore a person's standing to approach the kami again.