2 min read
Seals in Popular Culture
Αἱ Σφραγῖδες ἐν τοῖς Νέοις Μύθοις
Popular culture has kept alive what the modern West forgot. Its most successful works of the occult imagination run on hand seals.
Naruto
The ninja of Masashi Kishimoto weave in (印), hand seals, to knead their chakra into a technique. There are 12 basic seals named after the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac, from Rat to Boar, and the sequence of seals defines the technique. The official guidebooks bear the titles 臨, 兵, 闘, 者, 皆 and 陣: the first 6 characters of the kuji formula.
Dragon Ball Z
Akira Toriyama's fighters fire their energy through the shape of their hands. The Kamehameha is released from cupped hands brought forward from the hip. Tien's Tri-Beam, Kikōhō (気功砲, "qigong cannon"), passes through a diamond opening formed by both hands and drains the user's own life force. Toriyama drew on Hong Kong martial-arts cinema and the Chinese classic Journey to the West.
Jujutsu Kaisen
Every Domain Expansion in Gege Akutami's series is sealed with a hand sign. Japanese commentators identify them with Buddhist seals: Gojō's with the seal of Taishakuten (Indra), Sukuna's with that of Enmaten (Yama), Megumi's with the seal of Yakushi Nyorai, the Medicine Buddha.
Doctor Strange
For the 2016 film the spell-casting gestures were choreographed by the finger-tutting dancer JayFunk, who named among his sources the ability activations of Japanese anime. The seal crossed from Asia to the West through the screen.
In 2016 researchers at Mie University measured the brain waves of practitioners of the Kōga school as they formed kuji seals under stress and reported a body at rest with a mind holding its focus. The fiction exaggerates. Its source is real practice.
Gertrud Hirschi, Mudras: Yoga in Your Hands
The standard practical manual of the hand seals, with their indications and meditations. The Temple of Zeus recommends it as a purchase for every Zevist library, personal or communal.