>>97539 Thanks! Modern Paganism is a fascination of mine, and I absolutely love to immerse myself in the weirdness. Probably makes me feel better about myself lul. It makes wonderful peaople-watching.
With regards to Shinto, theologically it is very similar to Druidry which I think naturally deters a lot of the real crazies. Animism is not fun for the weirdos who want to get into god worship like hard polytheism is. (There is a pantheon of gods, of course, similar to the various Celtic Druid paths, but it is not the main focus of the religion.) Also, white folks tend to get into Buddhism if they are going to get into any Eastern Asian belief system.
Shinto is a weird one because it is so wildly bastardized even in Japanese media, that you usually get Western anime nerds who think it is all Fatal Frame ghosts and kitsune (fox spirits). Which can create some interesting weaboos who swear they worship Susano'o or something fairly run of the mill for younger "pagans".
Also, the issue is that Shinto also doesn't have a huge shaman aspect to it, plus drugs are super illegal in Japan, so you don't even get the "drugs are the window to muh soul" tourism that Buddhism and Hinduism attract in India/southeast Asia.
However, I will share that my cousin had a psychedelic experience in Japan with some other white guys who were practicing a bastardized Hindu/Shinto "religion" that involved a mish-mash of the two, and they all ended up literally shitting themselves in the woods for a week and nearly died.
Now, if you'd like to get into an even weirder rabbit hole… (this is going to be another stupidly long comment, sorry.) I will admit that I believe to this day that I was directly responsible in the festering of this weird pagan subgroup.
If you are familiar at all with Naruto, you will know that there is a minor god in the series named Jashin. Basically edgelord fuel, you gotta sacrifice blood/dead animals to him for, uh immortality. It's literally in Naruto. Now, when I was younger, I found out that there was a tiny cult following of this god, people proclaiming he was real and actually a Japanese god (Technically Shinto but jesus this is rabbit hole levels of bizarre.)
Being me, fascinated by how people can literally go so far off the wall as to worship a fucking anime god, I decided to pose as a believer in this group. I even built a forum that became really active (for the subject matter) in maybe 2009? (Now defunct, I have literally spent the last 30 minutes attempting to get into the old email address I used for it.)
It was full-on fly-on-the-wall bizarreness delivered to my desktop. There was a Serbian girl who would post absolutely psychotic ramblings, pictures of dead animals, etc who was very popular in the community and eventually became a patron of my forum.
These people really, truly believed that Jashin was in fact not a fake god written into a Naruto subplot, but an actual god that was nearly lost to time, developed by some Japanese minority or something. Any "historical" information you find on Jashin is absolutely, 100% fabricated. There is an Amino group that has members that are still, to my knowledge, active, though this weird little cult is, for the most part, a tiny relic from the past. Mostly harmless edgelord emo kids from the mid 2000's, but it was such an interesting window into some of the most tortured and mentally ill people in the anime fandom. Mostly girls, too, with few moids sprinkled in.