kory
So as 2501 mentioned everything Twin Peaks (including FWWM, Secret Diary, etc.) was a great commercial and critical success in Japan, and therefore overt visual allusions— in SMT and all over Japanese pop culture in general— are likely to be intentional homage: any checkered floorboards and heavy drapes for sure, and I buy example #1 as well, nice catch.
On the other hand:
David Lynch being very into East Asian mysticism
In some of these other examples it’s just parallelism in mythology.
Magatsuhi derives from an expression in the Kojiki, which along with the Nihon Shoki are the oldest surviving major literary works native to Japan, comprising a mythologized account of the nation’s forming— and the oldest references to the gods and religious practices later called “Shinto”, i.e. the animistic polytheism of the Yamato people (depending on how long we talk about this, it will be crucial to distinguish Shinto from the syncretized Shinto-Buddhism of later periods).
Specifically, it comes from 八十枉津日神* , yasomagatsuhinokami, a term used in the Kojiki to refer in general to evil gods and natural disaster. Literally, it breaks down as:
八十 = Eighty; multiples of eight (as in 八百万) at the time figuratively referred to “countlessness”, numbers too high to memorize.
禍 = evil deeds, misfortune
津 = port, harbor
日 = day
神 = god
Therefore: “gods of endless bad weather at the harbor”, which for an early waterlocked nation that subsisted much on coastal fishing, you can imagine held a very grim connotation, indeed! “Magatsuhi” alone is not a traditional term but excluding the 八十 and 神 seems to parse a clear meaning: it must be “the minimal unit of evil”.
Now, as for whether this is influenced by Garmonbozia? Let’s note that neither Shinto nor Buddhism has a concept that’s quite comparable to “sin” (nor “grace”). There is overlap of meaning in such Shinto and Indo-Buddhist religious concepts as kegare, tsumi, karma**, and duḥkha — but no perfect, 1:1 match for the Christian dogma on “sin”, which the many Judeo-Christian branches so love to argue over and which has at times been argued to be a discrete, measurable and/or transmutable substance. (Paging @TracyDMcGrath heh, heh)
It is a major tenet of SMT— or rather, of millenial Japanese オカルト occult sub-culture— to take Japan’s already-messy melting pot of eastern religious traditions and attempt adding western Judeo-Christianity also, and so until such time as they present “Magatsuhi” as creamed corn, I would take it at face-value as presented in the game.
* My personal favorite video game reference to this is The Last Blade 2, wherein Hibiki’s blacksmith father died after being forced to forge the cursed sword 八十枉津日太刀 at the demand of the incarnate demon Setsuna.
** I’m guessing all posters here have a basic grasp of what karma is, but you might want to check that article anyway: specifically the brief mention that it has been interpreted in Shinto tradition as overlapping with— drum roll please — “musubi”.
the demi-fiend is confronted by a tall cylindrical object
Are you tired yet? Thankfully, this one has a rather direct answer! The Nocturne save points are based on Tibetan prayer wheels, whose use has also been adopted widely in the greater Indo-Buddhist tradition. The wheel is engraved with written mantras or sutras and— an idea that I have always thought is metal religion-punk— it is thought that rotating it on its spoke invokes the same (or comparable) spiritual power as a monk chanting the words aloud.
Considering Nocturne’s reliance on the Japanese concept of kotodama this is also— you guessed it— another example of that オカルト系 blending of historically disparate religious themes.
