section_path: Practices/Spirit mediumship and healing
section_name: Spirit mediumship and healing
paragraph_text: Spirit mediumship and healing
  
  Shinto practitioners believe that the kami can possess a human being and then speak through them, a process known as kami-gakari. Several new religious movements drawing upon Shinto, such as Tenrikyo and Oomoto, were founded by individuals claiming to be guided by a possessing kami. The takusen is an oracle that is passed from the kami via the medium.
  
  The itako and ichiko are blind women who train to become spiritual mediums, traditionally in Japan's northern Tohoku region. Itako train under other itako from childhood, memorialising sacred texts and prayers, fasting, and undertaking acts of severe asceticism, through which they are believed to cultivate supernatural powers. In an initiation ceremony, a kami is believed to possess the young woman, and the two are then ritually "married". After this, the kami becomes her tutelary spirit and she will henceforth be able to call upon it, and a range of other spirits, in the future. Through contacting these spirits, she is able to convey their messages to the living. Itako usually carry out their rituals independent of the shrine system. Japanese culture also includes spiritual healers known as ogamiya-san whose work involves invoking both kami and Buddhas.