Occult Japan/Incarnations
INCARNATIONS.
I.
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FTER the miracles, or possessions of things, follow, in order of esoteric ascension, the incarnations, or possessions of people.
The miracles, as I have hinted, are performed largely with an eye, at least one eye, to the public. To drench one's self with scalding water or to saunter unconcernedly across several yards of scorching coals are not in themselves feats that lead particularly to heaven, difficult as they may be to do. Esoterically regarded, they are rather tests of the proficiency already attained in the Way of the Gods than portions of that way needing actually to be traversed. The real burning question is whether the believer be pure enough to perform them pleasurably. To establish such capability to one's own satisfaction in the first place, and to the wonder of an open-mouthed multitude in the second, are the objects the pious promoters have in view.
Not so the incarnations. They too, indeed, serve a double purpose. But whereas they are, like the miracles, measures of the value of the purity of the man, they are also practical mediums of exchange between the human spirit and the divine. Foregone for directly profitable ends, loss of self is the necessary price of an instant part in the kingdom of heaven.
Perhaps the most startling thing about these Japanese divine possessions is their number; unless it be that being so numerous they should have remained so long unknown. But it is to be remembered that what no one is interested to reveal may stay a long while hid. For, with quite Anglican etiquette, the Japanese never thought to introduce their divine guests and their foreign ones to each other. Once introduced, the two must have met at every turn. Indeed, the visitants from the spirit-world remind one of those ghost-like forms of clever cartoonists, latent in the outlines of more familiar shapes, till, by some chance divined, they start to view, to remain ever after the most conspicuous things in the picture.
Thoroughly religious, the possessions are not in the least hierarchic. In theory esoteric enough, in practice they are, in the older sense of that word, profane. For godpossession is no perquisite of the priests. It is open to all the sufficiently pure. The reason for this lack of exclusiveness is to be sought in the essentially every-day family character of Shintō. Everybody is a descendant of the gods, and therefore intrinsically no less holy than his neighbor. Indeed, if ease of intercourse be any proof of kinship, the Japanese people certainly make good their claim to divine descent. For they pass in and out of the world beyond as if it were part of this world below.
Purity is the one prerequisite to divine possession, and though to acquire sufficient purity be an art, it is an art patent rather in the older unindividualized sense of the word. Any one who is pure may give lodgment to a god, just as any plutocrat may entertain modern royalty. The gods, like latter day princes, are no respecters of persons. They condescend to come wherever due preparation is made for them. It is the host's house, not the host that they visit; the presence of the host himself being graciously dispensed with. The man's mind must have been vacated of all meaner lodgers, including himself, before the god will deign to habit it, but who the man is, is immaterial. Such humble folk as barbers and fishmongers are among the most favored entertainers of divinity.
But though the social standing of the man be immaterial, the social standing of the god, on the other hand, is a most material point in the matter. For mere association with the supernatural is not in Japan necessarily a question of piety or even of impiety. Often it is pure accident. To become possessed by a devil, of which bewitchment by a fox is the commonest form, may be so purely an act of the devil that no blame beyond carelessness attaches to the unfortunate victim. Religion claims no monopoly of intercourse with the unseen. What religion does claim is the ability to admit one to the very best heavenly society. For, to say nothing of mere animal spirits, there are all grades in gods, good gods and bad gods, great gods and little ones. Access to the most desirable divinities is the privilege to which the church holds the keys.
Capability to commune is thus in a general way endemic, much as salvation is held to be in some places, or infant damnation in others. And to Japanese thought the gods are very close at hand. Unsuspected as such presence be by foreigners, in the people's eyes the gods are constantly visiting their temples and other favorite spots, in a most ubiquitous manner. Indeed, after introduction to their Augustnesses, one is tempted to include them in the census and to consider the population of Japan as composed of natives, globe-trotters, and gods.
The gods resemble the globe-trotters in this, that both are a source of profit to the people. For finding themselves in communication with the superhuman, the Japanese early turned the intimacy to practical account. They importuned these their relatives for that of which men stand most in need, the curing of disease. Out of this arose a national school of divinopathy.
Civilized cousins of the medicine-men of North America, of the shamans of savage tribes the world over, and of Christian scientists generally, the Japanese practitioners differ from most members of the profession in the widespread popular character of their craft. For though all the practitioners are religious men, they are by no means all priests. Except for a difference in degree, the distinction between the priests who practice and the practicing lay brethren lies in the professional or avocational character of their performance. The priests, of course, have no other business than to be pious, and to be temporarily a god is an easy extension to being perpetually godlike. The lay brethren, on the other hand, practice such possession only as an outside calling, each having his more mundane trade to boot. The above-mentioned barber, for example, besides industriously shaving man, woman, and child,—this detail of the toilet being universally indulged in, in Japan,—was able to carry on a very lucrative business as a popular otherworld physician. But he made no analogue of the European barber-surgeon of times gone by. No particular pursuit has privilege of the divine practice, barbers being no better than other folk in the eyes of the god. A divinopathist's earthly trade may be anything under heaven. Plastering and clerking in a wine-shop are among the latest specimen occupations I have met with of men thus engaged in business both with this world and the next.
These doctors of divinity receive regular diplomas, without which they are not allowed to practice. Nominally they are not allowed to practice with them, for in the certificates no mention is made of the special object for which the certificates are issued, permission being granted merely to perform prayer, which comprehensive phrase covers a multitude of saintly acts.
The reason the certificates read so beautifully vague is not that religion conceives her esoteric cults to be profoundly secret, but that the government imagines them to be barbarous because not in keeping with foreign manners and customs. At the same time, the paternal powers-that-be dare not proscribe them. The fact is, they are both too Japanese to be countenanced and too Japanese to be suppressed; so the authorities wink at their practice. The Japanese government is, in more matters than this one, in much the same awkward state of mind as the Irish legislator, who declared himself to be "for the bill and agin its enforcement."
Divinopathy has one great advantage over other schools of medicine: by the very preparation for healing others the physician heals himself. For mere qualification to be a practitioner is itself a preventive to earthly ills; much as vaccination precludes small-pox. The only question might be whether the cure be not worse than the complaint. After an account of the rigid self-discipline to be undergone before a diploma be possible, and then largely kept up for it to continue in force, I think it will seem uncommonly open to the doubt. Yet there are plenty of men who lead this life of daily hardship and renunciation for the explicit purpose of enjoying the life they renounce; just as many an invalid will give up all that makes life worth living for the sake of living the undesirable residue longer.
But if the self-martyrdom be duly performed, the god practically always descends on application, and vouchsafes his opinion as to the cure of the complaint. Of course his prescriptions are religiously followed, and if report speak truth, with an unusually large percentage of success. Any and all diseases are thus cured on presentation, subject only to the willingness of the god. This proviso satisfactorily explains the few unfortunate failures.
Divine possession is not limited in its applications to the curing of disease. Naturally the divine opinion is quite as valuable on other subjects as on medicine, and is consequently quite as much in demand. From the nature of the gods themselves to the weather of the coming month, anything a man may want to know is thus inquired about of deity. Due care only must be exercised to grade the importance of the question to the importance of the gods. For gods of high rank stand as much on their dignity as men, both in the matter of coming and in the matter of talking after they have come. I remember once a most superior person, as gods go, who grew very angry because I asked him a question he deemed it beneath him to answer, although he had descended on purpose to impart information, and told me, quite up and down, to go to the god of agriculture (Inari-sama) for trivialities of the kind.
The character of the company sought is what renders excessive self-mortification necessary. It is only to the very best heavenly society that introductions are so hard to get. Inferior gods permit intimacy on much easier terms. Ordinary ichiko or trance-diviners, for instance, whose deities rank much lower, go through a preparation which is mild in comparison.
II.
The one thing needful to insure divine possession is purity. If you are pure, that is, blank enough, you can easily give habitation to a god. Now some men are born blanker than others, but none are by nature quite blank enough for religious purposes, though secularly they often seem so. Additional vacuity must somehow be acquired, the amount varying not only with the man, but with the rank of the god by whom he desires to be possessed. To reach this state of inanity is the object of the austerities (gyō)
In the days of Ryōbu there were two classes of men who indulged in mortification of the flesh to the attainment of thus losing themselves,—gyōja and shinja. With pure Shintō, that is, the present resurrection of the past pure faith, these names are naturally not popular, inasmuch as they savor of the millennial lapse from orthodoxy. But the course in practical piety pursued by the would-be pure, having itself always been de rigueur, remains still substantially the same.
Gyōja, translated, means "a man of austerities;" and heaven is witness that he is. Short of actual martyrdom, I can imagine few thornier paths to perfection. He would seem to need a cast-iron constitution to stand the strain he cheerfully puts upon it. Even to be a shinja necessitates a regimen that strikes the unregenerate with awe. Though shinja means simply "a believer," the amount of works this simple believer must perform before his faith is enough to be accepted would appall most people.
The curriculum has this in common with more secular ones, that whoso goes in at the one end usually comes out at the other, unless protracted austerity pall upon him; in which case he quits in the middle. The fact that so many graduate shows that no extraordinary capacity is required to do so; indeed, it is the capacity for incapacity that is necessary. Plodding perseverance is what wins the day. For the course is terrifically arduous and terribly long.
To the purification of the spirit, the road lies through the cleansing of the body. To this end the two chief exercises are washing (suigyō) and fasting (danjiki). Unlimited bathing, with most limited meals; such is the backbone of the regimen. The external treatment, being the more important of the two, claims notice first.
Washing is the most obvious kind of purification the world over. Cleanliness, we say, is next to godliness; though at times in individual specimens the two would seem not to have made each other's acquaintance. But in Japan cleanliness very nearly is godliness. This charming compatibility is due possibly to the godliness being less, but certainly chiefly to the cleanliness being more.
Even secularly the Japanese are supernaturally cleanly. Every day of their lives forty millions of folk parboil like one. Nor do they hurry themselves in the act. The nation spends an inordinate amount of time in the national tub; as becomes pecuniarily apparent when you hire a man by the day, or, stranger yet, by the job. You are tempted at times to suppose your toiler continuously either tubbing or teaing. Doubtless such totality is due to emotional exaggeration on your part, but it is beyond prejudice that he soaks in his tub a good working minority of his time.
When it comes to religious matters, it would seem as if this estimable quality were carried to its inevitable defect. For, from a pardonable pastime, bathing here becomes an all-engrossing pursuit. The would-be devotee spends his waking life at little else, and he sleeps less than most men at that. Not only is it his bounden duty to bathe six appointed times in every twenty-four hours, but he should also bathe as often as he may between. The more he bathes the better he becomes.
Now, if he simply soaked in a hot water tub as his profane friends do, this might be merely the ecstatic height of dissipation. But he does nothing of the kind. No gentle parboiling is his portion; perpetual flesh is his lot. For in his case no such amelioration of nature is allowed. Whatever the season of the year, his ablutions must be made in water of untempered temperature, fresh from the spring; in the depth of winter a thing of cold comfort indeed. It then goes by the expressive name of kangyō, or the cold austerity. What is more, he takes this uncongenial application in the mode to produce the most poignant effect—with the shock of a shower-bath.
Esoterically there are grades in the cleansing capabilities of shower-baths. For him who would reach the height of holiness the correct thing is to walk under a waterfall and be soused. This luxury is, of course, only to be had in the hills. In default of a waterfall, a douche from a dipper will do. But on religious grounds it is not to be recommended.
Man-made methods are imperative in town owing to the lack of natural ones, which is one reason why the hills are the proper habitat for novitiates into the higher life. In the good old days such habitat was a necessity, not that men were less pure then, but, on the contrary, that they strove to become yet purer, so gyōja aver; pure Shintō says it was because they had then lapsed from orthodoxy. However that be, when gyōja were gyōja they were anchorites pure and simple. They dwelt as hermits among the hills, seeing no man by the space of three years, and reducing themselves as nearly as might be to a state of nature; of the inoffensive kind, for, as their diet will show, they belonged rather to the herbivorous than to the carnivorous order of wild animal. After they had become quite detached from all that distinguishes humanity, they returned to the world to live hermitically in the midst of it, repairing again at suitable seasons to mountaineering meditation. Such were the men who opened, as the consecrated phrase is, Ontaké, that is, who first succeeded in reaching its sacred summit. There are still a few of these estimable creatures at large in the hills. I have myself met some of them, there and elsewhere, after their return to society, and have gazed with interest at caves pointed out to me which they had once inhabited.
But gyōja generally have deteriorated with the world at large. They are far from being what they were, so far that a conscientious man hardly feels that he has the right to call himself a gyōja at all, as one of the class humbly informed me. He blushed, he said, when he thought of the austerities of the olden time. A modern gyōja was little more austere than a shinja who made his summer pilgrimages when he could. This was perhaps a gloomy view to take of the situation, for one usually finds the past not so superior to the present as report represents. But even at its worst, the deterioration would seem a case only for professional sympathy. For whatever the regimen may have been, there is at all events enough severity left it to satisfy any decent desire for self-martyrdom.
That mountains should be deemed peculiarly good points for entering another world is not unnatural. With inclines incapable of cultivation, they do not conduce to sociability, but enable the dweller there the more effectively to meditate himself into inanity. Unjogged by suggestion, the average mind lapses into a comatose condition, till the man comes eventually to exist upon the borderland of trance. But as it is not convenient for everybody to retire to the hills for three years at a time, even for this sublime purpose, it has been found possible to combine purity enough for vacuity with a tolerably secular existence. The gyō in the two cases differ only as a state of nature differs from a condition of civilization.
This brings us back again to the bath, for we are not half through with it yet. If the neophyte be not taking the waterfall in all simplicity on his head, he is outdoing Diogenes by living not simply in his tub, but tubbing. A cold water douche begins the day, another marks its meridian, and a third brings it to a close. But the day does not bring the douche to a close. Just before turning in the neophyte must take another dip, after which it might indeed be thought that he should sleep in peace. But such would savor of pandering to the flesh. The most vital ablution of all, therefore, the crux putificationis, occurs at two a. m. (yatsugyō). At this unearthly hour the poor creature must wake himself up, stagger half asleep to the waterfall or bathroom, souse himself with a dipper or be soused by the fall, while his teeth chatter a prayer and his fingers twist themselves into cabalistic knots, he himself shivering the while from top to toe; then, brought up standing in this manner, try if he may to sleep again. Even should he succeed, his doze may not be for long, for with the dawn he must douche again, the sunrise austerity (hi-no-de-gyō).
Unearthly the midnight hour may advisedly be called, for it is for precisely such attribute that the time is chosen. At that dead of night, when every sound is hushed, and even the plants, they say, lie locked in sleep, the gods can the better hear. And this, oddly enough, in spite of their being very much engaged with their own spatterings and sputterings, for the gods themselves are then taking their baths,—the gods of the mountains under their waterfalls, and the gods of the plain in the rivers thereof. In Japan, even the gods wash and are clean, and, like their human poor relations, apparently make of the bath a time of social reunion and merriment. They hear, nevertheless, and reward the bather accordingly.
With a shinja this nocturnal exercise is optional. It all depends upon how pure he intends to become. Of course it is a great deal better to be thorough, and not for the sake of the flesh to shirk what shall etherealize the soul. A little more bathing can do no harm—unless it kill, which is beside the point.
Extras, that is baths at odd hours, are to be taken ad libitum by all. The rule is: When in doubt, douche.
This extreme lavatory exercise lasts indefinitely—as long as the devotee can stand it. And in diminishing doses it is kept up through life. To those who perform it in all its rigor under the waterfalls in the hills, the gods graciously show signs of accepted favor. For round the head of the holy, as he stands beneath the fall, the sunlight glancing through the spray rims a halo which all men may see and the reverent recognize as proof of sanctity. The skeptic may possibly ascribe it to a different cause, having perchance seen the like around the shadow of his own head cast, as he sat in the saddle, upon the clipped grass of a polo field. He will certainly do so when he perceives similar halos about the heads of his godless friends. Yet that abandoned character, Benvenuto Cellini, on suddenly remarking one day an aureole radiating from the reflection of his head in the water, as he leaned over the side of a boat, took it at once for sign certain that his salvation was assured.
So much for the fresh-water cure. To sum it up in a maxim,—adapting to its gentler warfare with the spirits of evil Danton's celebrated one about war in general,—we may say that the three essentials to success in it are: "De l'eau douce! de l'eau douce! et encore de l'eau douce!"
III.
Fasting (danjiki) is the next mortification to the flesh. The poor brute of a body unequally yoked to so indomitable a spirit fares ill. For it is deprived at once both of superficial gratification and of solid nourishment. The would-be pure must abstain from meat, from fish, from things cooked, and, comprehensively, from whatever has taste or smell. In short, he should lead gastronomically an utterly insipid existence. He may not even indulge in the national tea, a beverage tasteless and bodiless enough in all conscience to escape proscription. Salt is specially to be shunned (shiwodachi). It is worth noting that on the way to a higher life the apparently harmless chloride of sodium should work as banefully within a man as it works beneficially without him.
Greater deprivation than all these, even tobacco falls under the ban. In that earthly paradise of smokers, the Japanese Islands, where the use of the weed rises superior even to sex, it seems indeed hard that only those dedicate to deity should be debarred it. But the road to immaterial peace of mind knows no material narcotic by the way. After he has attained to a holy calm without it, the lay brother returns to moderate indulgence in this least gross form of gluttony. The professed ascetic continues to abjure it his life long.
Nuts and berries form the staple of the gyōja's diet, if he be living a hermit among the hills; buckwheat flour if, though not of the world, he be still in it. He may also eat vegetables and dried persimmons and grapes in their season; but he must eat most sparingly of whatever it be. One bowl of buckwheat and a dish of greens at noon is sustenance enough for the day. Breakfast and supper are forbidden panderings to the flesh. To wash this next to nothing down cold water is allowed him, if his external applications have not already given him enough of it.
Not unnaturally a diet of such subtraction speedily reduces him to his lowest mental terms, a state which he still further simplifies by purely mental means.
To start with, the general character of his existence conduces to that end. Whether he be living an actual anchorite among the mountains or only a would-be one in town, solitude complete or partial tends by well-known laws to convert him into either a maniac or a simpleton. To a species of the latter it is his ambition to attain.
To this end untold repetitions of elementary prayers admirably conduce. It would be hard indeed to overestimate the efficacy of such process for producing utter blankness of mind. The subdued chanting by rote over and over again of words to which any thought has long since bade good-by tends in a twofold manner to mental vacuity. There is just enough mental action going on to keep the mind from thinking of anything else, and yet it is so ineffably uninteresting that attention, do what it will, inevitably nods. It is a mistake to suppose that the soothing effects of church are wholly due to sound sleep during the sermon. Any auditory routine is competent to compel it. Rhythmic monotone is as potent a lullaby as more consecrated cradlesong. The eventual end of both would be sleep; as we see with the latter in the case of an infant in his crib or of middle-aged gentlemen in their pews, and in our own case with the former when we conquer our insomnia by methodically counting to a hundred an indefinite number of times. The chanter does not attain to this supreme nirvana because it is he himself that is preaching the sermon; but the soporific power of these rites in helping to a virtuous vacancy of mind is quite specific, and partly accounts incidentally for the long-windedness of preachers.
To this same intent, the more searching brother practices upon himself further ingenious devices. One of the most effective of these is the concentrating his whole attention upon his own breathing. Mentally, he scrutinizes each expiration—the inspirations inspirations appear to be somewhat better able to look after themselves—with molecular minuteness. Each breath as it passes out is thus subjected to the spirit's picket challenge. By giving his whole mind in this manner to the mere method of existence, he effectually prevents any ideas from stealing into that mind unawares. After prolonged duty of the sort, consciousness, like all really good sentinels, nods at her post; in which, unlike the good sentinels, lies the virtue of the deed, though unsuspected of the doer. For divine possession in Japan, like other Japanese things, is not a science but an art. The reason given by religion for this inspection of one's breathing is that by prayerful concentration upon the source of spirit one's evil spirit may be expelled and a good afflatus drawn in. One of the truly pious when quantitively questioned told me that he had thus kept watch on himself for three weeks at a time, only pausing in the pursuit unavoidably to eat and sleep. It is saddening to think to what farther tenuities he might not have attained had he not been thus grossly shackled to the flesh.
Ablutions and abstinence are thus the two great gyō which endless prayers, mechanical finger-charms, and careful breathing help accentuate.
But besides the regular stock austerities, there are several supererogatory ones. There is, for example, the gyō called tsumadachi which consists in walking on the tips of one's toes wherever one has occasion to go. A species of pious ballet-dancing this.
Then there is the austerity of never looking upon a woman's face. This martyrdom the ascetic who had practiced it spoke of as a very severe self-infliction indeed. But in view of the vast subjective disturbance wrought even unconsciously by the sex, I should judge it to be one of the most essential austerities of all. For no man who is a man can take that absorbing interest in nothing at all which the rules require while a pair of piquant eyes and a petticoat lead his imagination their irresistible dance. To be insensible to such charm were to have attained to complete insensibility already.
Compared with this renunciation, the next gyō must be a positive pleasure. It consists in letting unlimited mosquitoes bite one to satiety for seven consecutive nights.
The aptitude of all these artifices to the end desired is more or less apparent: some tending to slow down the whole machine; or by weakening the body, or by tiring the mind, some to dull the sense perceptions by persistent attention to what is essentially incapable of holding it,—all to reduce the brain to an inactive state. The road is unnecessarily long because originally discovered by chance, and then blindly followed by succeeding ages without rational improvement. An immense amount of labor is thus in point of fact thrown away. How much quicker a like result can be obtained by the application of a little science, modern hypnotism shows.
Now there will have been noticed in the list of austerities a steady departure from primitive simplicity. This decrease in simplicity is strictly paralleled by the decrease in their respective use. Everybody washed, though comparatively few poised on their toes. The several vogue of the austerities is further paralleled by the position occupied by those who practiced them, in that long chain of mixed belief which, dependent from pure Shintō at the one end, is supported by Buddhism from the other. The mosquito ordeal, for example, is quite Buddhist, while abnormal ablutions are not. The significance of these two parallelisms will appear later on.
What the Japanese sensations are during the process may be gathered from the personally narrated experience of a certain believer, who sufficiently expresses the type. The given individual was first minded to become a practitioner in consequence of the surprising cure, through god-possession, of his master's sick son. He was at the time apprenticed to a dyer, and was away on a journey when the cure was wrought. Much impressed by what he heard on his return, he determined to seek out the holy man who had effected the miraculous result, and, by following in his footsteps, to attain to proficiency himself. The gyōja received him cordially, and kindly indulged him in his desire by putting him to the washing (suigyō) and the fasting (danjiki) austerities in all their rigor for three weeks. At the end of that time he was so used up that he could hardly stand. One bowl of rice and a dish of greens a day are little enough to help one through such a course of ablutionary training. Nevertheless, for fifty days more he kept on with but little addition to his meagre diet, washing lavishly the while. At the close of this second period he relaxed somewhat and ate, as he expressed it, in moderation, that is, immoderately little; which ameliorated treatment of himself he kept up for the next three years. He was twenty when he went through his novitiate, and sixty-three when he told me of it; for the intervening forty-three years he had dieted and douched daily.
No very definite sensation, follows, he says, the exercise of the austerities. He simply feels an increase in virtue, whatever that may mean. Fortunately it would seem to show itself in a practical form. For as he continues in the regimen he gets to know, he says, good and evil spontaneously. When a bit of good luck is coming to him or his family, or a misfortune about to befall them, he feels it beforehand by a certain mental light-heartedness, or a corresponding oppression of spirit. Finally he arrives at being able to predict everything. Whether he can always avert what he is able to foretell may be open to doubt. For consequent upon this exposure of his capabilities the poor man contracted a very bad cold, and was confined for a couple of weeks to his house.
He was, as the mention of his family showed, a married man. In this he made no exception to the rule. All lay brethren marry as a matter of course. Indeed, in Shintō proper, the priests wed like anybody else. Nor do such as follow the austerities commit themselves in the least to celibacy. For matrimony and self-consecration to the gods do not, it appears, conflict. In spite of the great advantage that accrues to piety from never looking upon a woman's face, mentioned above, mere matrimony would seem innocuous. Either femininity in repeated doses loses its intoxicating effect, or acquired sanctity renders the believer superior to it. Perhaps, as one of my married friends suggested to me, marriage is sufficient austerity itself.
However that may be, certain it is that nowadays even gyōja wed without detriment to their souls. I am by no means sure that they did not in the olden time, for so commonplace a detail of a far oriental's life as matrimony might well have escaped chronicling. Still there is no doubt that times have changed for the worse with gyōja, as my gyōja averred. Even pecuniarily so much is evident. In the good old days they supported themselves in peace and plenty from the offerings of grateful patients; now alas, as he said pathetically, these gratuities do not suffice, and many a worthy soul is forced to eke out a slender subsistence by secular work in secret. Making toothpicks was the industry he affectingly instanced, when pressed to be more explicit. To be driven to such extremity must seem indeed pitiable, even to the undevout.
Thus, then, do the pious get themselves into a general potentiality of possession. Before possession becomes a fact, however, a short renewal of extreme austerities must be undergone; like the slight shake that crystallizes the solution. On notice of a case to be cured the practitioner enters again the rigors of the washing and the fast, and keeps them up for a week if he be very thorough, two or three days if that will suffice. The amount of abstinence depends upon the gravity of the case. There is something highly satisfactory in this dieting of the physician in place of the patient. From the patient's point of view it instantly raises divinopathy above all other pathies on earth. Besides, it is more thoroughly logical. For why, indeed, should not the physician, if well paid for it, be expected to furnish all the elements of his cure!
IV.
We have now reached the function itself. That this is imposing in the first sense of that word, that is, impressive, the hold it has had on man sufficiently testifies; that it is imposing in the second sense, that is, a sham, is a supposition which the first view of one of these trances would suffice to dispel.
We will first take up the Ryōbu form which is the commonest one. The ceremony with which Ryōbu has surrounded the act is finely in keeping with the impressiveness of the act itself. So sense-compelling a service you shall find it hard to match in the masses of any other church. But more constraining still are the energy and the sincerity with which the whole is done. It is small wonder that the already susceptible subject feels its charm when even bystanders are stirred.
As with the gyō, purification is of its essence. For not only must a general purification antecede the act, but a special purification must immediately precede it. And first the spot must be holy. Now only one spot is holy by nature: the sacred mountain Ontaké or its affiliated peaks. All others must be purified. These may be of two kinds: temples, public or private,—for most houses have what is called a gods'-shelf, (kamidana), which does them for family shrine,—and ordinary rooms. The first are kept perpetually purified; the second are specially purified for the occasion.
If there be no permanent shrine, a temporary one is constructed. Its central motif is a gohei upon a wand, stood upright on a pedestal. By the side of the gohei are lighted candles, and flanking these, sprigs of sakaki, the sacred tree of Shintō. In front of the gohei is set out a feast for the god. The feast varies in elaborateness according to the occasion, its principal dishes being a bowl of rice, a saucer of salt, and a cup of saké the national wine. In addition to these indispensables, any form of uncooked human food may be offered to the god, according to the sumptuousness of the repast it is desired to give him.
The shrine is set up in the tokonoma, or recess of honor, of the room. At the back is placed a hanging-scroll of the gods of Ontaké. Some five feet in front of the tokonoma, in the centre of the sacred space, a porous earthenware bowl is placed upon a stand, and in the bowl is built a pyre of incense sticks, usually beginning as a log-hut and terminating as a wigwam.
Then the place is purified. This is done by inclosing the room, or the part of it in front of the shrine, by strings from which depend at intervals small gohei. These are usually arranged after the so-called seven-five-three (shichi-go-san) pattern; seven of them being nearest the shrine, five on each side, and three at the farther end. From the space so inclosed all evil spirits are driven out by prayer, by finger-charms, by sprinkling of salt, by striking of sparks from a flint and steel, and by brandishing of a gohei-wand used as an exorcising air-broom.
After the purification of the place, the next duty of the officiators is the purification of their persons. For this purpose they all go out to the well or to the bathroom to bathe, and return clad in the Ontaké pilgrim dress, a single white garment stamped with the names of the Ontaké gods, with the name of the mountain itself, and with the signs of their kō or pilgrim club. For, as we shall see more particularly later, all Ryōbu adepts, whether priests or laymen, are enrolled in some Ontaké pilgrim club. This solitary garment is bound about the waist by a white girdle.
In its full complement the company consists of eight persons. There is, first, the man whom the god is to possess. He is called the nakaza, or seat-in-the-midst. Equal to him in consideration is the man who presides over the function and who is to talk with deity, the exorcist, so to speak, called the maeza, or seat-in-front. Next in religious rank is the wakiza, or side-seat. He is one of the shiten or four heavens, specialized as the tōhō, or eastern side, the hoppō, or northern side, the nambō, or southern side, and the saihō, or western side. Their duty is to ward off evil influences from the four quarters. The two front ones also have the charge of the paraphernalia, and the nambō the care of the patient. In addition to these six there is a deputy maeza and a sort of clerk of court. The impersonality of these names is worth noting. It is the post, not the person, that is designated.
Severally clapping their hands, the performers now enter upon the ceremony proper. This consists of two parts: a general purification service, separated by a pause and a rearrangement from the communion service itself. The one is an essential preface to the other.
When the last man is fairly launched upon the general incantation, the maeza starts one of the purification prayers (harai), into which the others instantly fall. The prayer chosen to begin with is usually the misogi no harai. It is a chant chiefly in monotone, only occasionally lapsing for a note into the octave or the fifth. Every now and then a chanter sinks into a guttural grunt as if mentally fatigued, very suggestive of a mechanical dulling of the mind.
The harai over, or rather bridged by some of the company, the maeza starts another, the rest take it in swing, and the eight are off again together. In this manner prayer after prayer is intoned, and uta or songs chanted in like cadence between. Shakings of the shakujō, a small crosier with metal rings, emphasize the rhythm, and the pilgrim bells rung at intervals point the swift processional chorus of the whole.
The pyre is then lighted, and as the flames leap into the air, prayers ascend with them to Fudō-sama. Meanwhile, pieces of paper with characters inscribed on them are rapidly passed to and fro through the flame by the maeza an unlimited number of times; yet do they not burn, an immunity due to possession by the gods. Then he holds each for a moment stationary in the flame, upon which it catches fire and is caught upward by the air current, to float away, the shriveled shape of its former self. The paper is in effigy of the disease, and, according as it ascends or fails to do so, will the disease itself depart or stay. Some exorcists, with more wisdom, perhaps, say that the manner of its ascension only is significant. But mark how pitying are the gods. For since the flame makes its own draft, that must indeed be an unlucky wraith of tissue ash that fails of being well caught up with it to heaven.
More chanting brings the purification service to a close.
The bowl that held the pyre is then removed, and sheets of paper are laid in the centre of the sacred space in the new places the performers are to occupy. Then the gohei-wand is brought down from the shrine and stood up in the midst.
The men take their seats for the descent of the god. Up to this time they squat on their heels in the usual Japanese fashion; from now on they sit with folded legs, which some say is the exalted seat of old Japan, and others ascribe to Buddhist influence. The maeza seats himself first, opposite and facing the shrine, folds his legs in front of him, and, drawing his dress over them, ties it together from the sides and then brings the farther end up and ties it to his girdle. This is the usual Japanese mode of tying up a bundle. The others do the same, the shiten seating themselves at the four corners, and the deputy maeza and clerk by the side of the maeza. The nakaza is as yet unseated, officially speaking.
All face the gohei and go through a further short incantation. Then the wakiza reverently removes the gohei-wand and holds it while the nakaza seats himself where it was, facing from the shrine, tucks himself in as the others did, and closes his eyes. After some private finger-twistings and prayer on the part of the nakaza and the maeza, the nakaza brings his hands together in front of him and the maeza, taking the gohei-wand from the wakiza, places it between them. Then all the others join in chant, and watch for the advent of the god.
For a few minutes, the time varying with the particular nakaza, the man remains perfectly motionless. Then suddenly the wand begins to quiver; the quiver gains till all at once the man is seized with a convulsive throe—the throe, as we say in truth, of one possessed. In some trances the eyes then open, the eyeballs being rolled up half out of sight; in others the eyes remain shut. Then the throe subsides again to a permanent quiver, the eyes, if open, fixed in the trance look. The man has now become the god.
The maeza, bowed down, then reverently asks the name of the god, and the god answers; after which the maeza prefers his petitions, to which the god makes reply. When he has finished asking what he will and the god has finished replying, the nakaza falls forward on his face.
The maeza concludes with a prayer; then striking the nakaza on the back, with or without the ceremony of previously writing a cabalistic character (a Sanskrit one) there, the maeza wakes him up. One of the others gives the man water from a cup, and when he has been able to swallow it, the rest set to and rub his arms and body out of their cataleptic contraction. For at first it is practically impossible to take the wand from his unnatural grasp.
Although eight men are considered the proper number by Ryōbu canons for a full presentation of the function, so many are not really vital to its performance. Two are all that are absolutely essential; one to be possessed, and one to hear what the god may deign to say. I have seen trances with officiators in number anywhere from two to eight. One man alone would be sufficient, were it not a part of the rite that some one should hear the god's words; for one man can take the parts of both maeza and nakaza in turn, doing the maeza's part for the preliminary purification, and the nakaza's for the possession itself. In this case the second man acts as wakiza. Ordinarily, however, when two men take part, one is the maeza and the other the nakaza from the beginning to the end. With three men, the third is wakiza. Of this kind was the possession upon Ontaké, in the case of the three devotees.
From the moment he claps his hands each begins upon a chain of finger-charms, of the effective uncouthness of which it is difficult to convey any idea in words. Their uncanny character is distinctly the most impressive thing in the function. They are called inmusubi or seal-bindings, which describes their intent, and incidentally their appearance. In form it is playing holy cat's-cradle with one's hands, but in feeling it is the most intense action imaginable. The fingers are tied into impossible knots with a vehemence which is almost maniacal; and the tying is timed to consecrated formulae that, in consequence of the performer's exaltation, take on much of the emotion of a curse.
The several twists typify all manner of acts. The position of the fingers in one symbolizes a well, raising which above the head and then upsetting it souses one with holy water. Another represents a very realistic pull, which constrains a good spirit to enter the performer. A third compels evil spirits to avaunt; and so forth and so on. There is quite an esoteric library on the subject, and so thoroughly defined is the system that the several finger-joints bear special names.
The seal-bindings are themselves sealed by a yet simpler digital device wrought with one hand, and called cutting the kūji or the nine characters. It consists in drawing in the air an imaginary five-barred gate, made of five horizontal bars and four vertical posts. This gate is to keep out the evil spirits. The reason there are nine strokes and not ten, which is the far-eastern dozen, is due to the far-eastern practice of always providing an enemy with a possible way of escape. If the Japanese devils could not thus run away it is said they would become dangerous. For, as a far-eastern proverb hath it,—
Will bite the cat."
At first I was inclined to believe these finger-charms Buddhist. But although the Ryōbuists say that they are, I have never seen a Buddhist practice them. On the other hand, they are professedly not Shintō, and are shunned by pure Shintōists accordingly. Their most devoted admirers are the Ryōbuists themselves.
The finger-charms are knotted upon one or other of the great purification prayers (harai). Of these there are three chief ones: the misogi no harai, the nakatomi no harai and the rokkon shōjō no harai. The misogi no harai I believe to be pure Shintō. The nakatomi no harai undoubtedly is a native production, and is said to have been composed by an ancestor of the present highpriest of the Shinshiu sect. The rokkon shōjō no harai is of Ryobu origin. It is the great Ontaké processional, chanted by the pilgrims as they toil slowly up the mountain's slopes.
V.
Having thus sketched the possession cult, I will now present some specimen trances of the various Ryōbu varieties of it. These shall be followed by the Buddhist possessions, and these in turn by the pure Shintō ones. When we shall thus have looked at the possession objectively in the manner, we will consider it subjectively in the man.
Heading the list comes the first possession that I succeeded in obtaining,—a parlor-possession in my own house. After very proper coquetting with mystery, a priest of the Shinshiu sect consented to visit me for the purpose with a friend as side-seat (wakiza). His performance was a case of playing consecutively two parts in the function: first that of exorcist, and then of entranced. Although he was a pure Shintō priest, the ceremony was according to Ryōbu rite; for he was a reformed Ryōbuist, and his reformation did not extend to the rite.
His introductory scene-setting enabled me to gaze for the first time upon the faces of the Ontaké gods. For he began by hanging up in the room's recess of honor a scroll depicting those deities; whom as yet I knew only as voices—voces et præterea nil. But inasmuch as talking is their chief characteristic, I accepted unhesitatingly their portraits for speaking likenesses. There were nine of their Augustnesses in all, standing pedestaled respectively on precipitous points of the conventional tri-peaked mount in conventionally inapt attitudes. They all wore the comfortable cast of countenance and generally immaculate get-up quite incompatible with ever getting up a mountain. This, of course, proved their divinity. The great god of Ontaké towered commandingly on the highest peak, flanked by two lesser Shintō divinities perched on somewhat lower pinnacles. Below these stood Fudō-sama—a conglomerate god from nobody knows exactly where, popularly worshiped as the god of fire, which it is certain he was not, but possessing, however, for some inscrutable cause a certain lien on the land. He, too, was flanked by two companions on suitable inferior vantage points. These peopled the mid-heaven of ascent. Still lower down came three canonized saints of Ryōbu, the men who had opened the mountain by first succeeding in getting to the top; for which feat they were now rewarded by being placed humbly at the bottom. The relative positions of the three classes of gods is worth notice, for such is their invariable ranking in Ryōbu pictures; a grading in greatness which says something about the Shintō ancestry of the act.
After the priest had duly hung up this happy family portrait and arranged the altar and incense pyre, he went and bathed, returning clothed in his Ontaké pilgrim robe, the very one in which he had himself several times made the ascent of the mountain, and which was therefore correspondingly pure. It showed this unmistakably. I think it was perhaps the dirtiest garment I have ever seen; at all events it was the most self-evidently so. It convinced at once of holiness in spite of the fact that it fortunately lacked all odor of sanctity. For it was internally as clean as externally it was dirty; it being, as we have seen, as imperative upon a palmer to wash himself as it is not to wash his robe.
Through the garment's present grimy gray glimmered traces of red characters; the stamped certificates, these, of his ascents. Their glory, enhanced by being hidden in an ideographic tongue, shone all the more resplendent for being thus mellowed by travelstain. It was a pious thought that induced the wearer later to let his mantle fall, in gift, upon me; for it now rests from its wanderings among my most valued possessions.
The pale gray of his ascension robe took on a further tinge of glory from the glow of the burning incense pyre. The seemingly conscious flame lapped the pyre eagerly about, and then leaped searchingly up into the void, to send its soul in aromatic surges of smoke in curling rise toward heaven, into every highest nook and cranny of the wood-paneled ceiling of the room. From without, the glow of dying day stole through the sliding screens, tinging the gloom within; while pervading it all like a perfume rose the chant of the pilgrim-clad petitioner, rolling up in surges of its own, smothering sense to some delicious dream. Behind, silent and immovable, sat the assistant, a statue bowed in prayer.
Through the flame the priest passed, one after the other, written sheets emblematic of disease; passed each deliberately to and fro an amazing number of times, yet without so much as scorching it. After which he held it there motionless for a moment and it swiftly took fire. As it did so his chant swelled. The shriveled shape wavered, poised, and then rose with the chant toward the rafters of the room. Its prayer had been heard and granted.
When the last embers of the pyre had burned themselves out, and the orange was slowly fading to ash, the priest brought his chant to a close, and, rising, removed the bowl. Then, spreading pieces of paper in a sort of Greek cross upon the mats where the bowl had been, he seated himself upon them in the nakaza's place, facing out from the shrine and prefacing his act by a short prayer, took the gohei-wand in both hands and shut his eyes. After some minutes of hushed suspense the wand suddenly twitched; the twitching grew to convulsions, the wand striking the man first on the forehead with quite irresponsible violence, and then with like frenzy on the floor. Finally it came back still quivering to its former position before his face. I say "it," for in truth it seemed rather the wand than the man that caused the shaking. Trembling there a few moments, it went off again into another throe; and so the action continued intermittently rising and falling, till at last the man himself fell face forward upon the floor.
The assistant advanced, raised the possessed to a sitting posture, and fell to thumping him on the back and chest to wake him. This energetic treatment brought him sufficiently to himself to be able to articulate for water. But when the glass was put to his lips he bit it to pieces in his frenzied efforts to drink. By good luck he neither cut himself nor swallowed any of the pieces.
After his senses had fully returned and his arms had been well kneaded, we carried him out upon the veranda, his legs still rigid in catalepsy. There they had to be violently rubbed and jerked into a natural state again. His pulse had been eighty-four at the time when he began upon his incantation; it was one hundred and twenty as he came to himself again.
When sufficiently recovered he went and bathed, and on returning, his first question was whether he had spoken in the trance. On being told that he had not uttered a syllable, he was much chagrined. He had hoped, he said, to have astounded us by speaking English when possessed, a tongue of which, in his normal state, he knew nothing. That he might be permitted to do so had been his petition as exorcist. Such supernatural powers, he assured us, were often vouchsafed by the gods; and he mentioned an Englishman (the only trace I have come across of a previous foreigner in this otherworld) who had been thus possessed twenty years before in Kobe, and who, though knowing no Japanese in his natural state, spoke it fluently in the trance. A parallel to this is to be found in the illiterate serving-girl of the German professor, who, in the hypnotic trance, astounded the bystanders by repeating whole pages of Greek, which, it turned out, she must unconsciously have learned from simply hearing her master read Greek plays aloud, while she casually came in and out to tend his fire.
I will next present a function with the full force of the dramatis personæ. It also was performed in my own house, by the Mi-Kagura-kō, or August Dancing Pilgrim Club. There were eight performers, the parts of maeza, nakaza, the four shiten, the deputy maeza, and the clerk of court, being taken respectively by a plasterer, a lumber dealer, a rice shopman, a carpenter, a pawnbroker, a pattern designer, a fishmonger, and a maker of mizuhiki, those red and white paper strings with which the Japanese tie bow-knots about their gifts. Quite a representative board of trade, in fact. The plasterer was the president of the club, and the pawnbroker its treasurer. This last combination was a mere coincidence, the man's earthly calling not being, so I was informed, any special recommendation to his heavenly office.
On the day appointed they turned up, more Japanico, pre-punctually. A polite, but at first aggravating national custom, this appearance of a guest considerably before the time for which he was invited. They came in detachments, the baggage leading, with the president and clerk. It was at once set up in scene, together with several other properties provided by me beforehand at the request of the club. The list of the latter articles was the better part of a foot long, and footed up to exactly thirty-one cents and a third.
A picture of Kuni-to-ko-dachi-no-mikoto, the great god of Ontaké, suitably pedestaled upon the mountain and flanked by his followers, was suspended in the recess, in front of which stood a gohei, bosomed in sprigs of Shinto's sacred tree, the dark green gloss of the leaves bringing out vividly the white paper flounces of the symbol of the god. On either side of it stood a candle speared upon its candlestick. A modest repast of salt and raw rice lay below, and flanking it a saké bottle not innocent of real saké. In front of the feast, in a pair of saucers, two tiny wicks floating in rape-seed oil made holy twinkles of light.
In the middle of the sacred space, duly inclosed by a frieze of pendent gohei, was built the symbolic primeval house of incense sticks. The place was then purified by prayer, by striking of sparks from a flint and steel, and by air-dusting with the gohei at each of the four corners, after which the eight officiators severally left for the bathroom to bathe, and returned one after the other clad in the pilgrim dress. The bathing, though in this case privately done, is often publicly performed. On the occasion of a fire-crossing (hi-watari), I have seen the holy performers strip and bathe quite naturally at a convenient well, in the face of the waiting populace of men, women, and children.
When the last man was back again before the altar, the eight launched in a body swingingly upon one of the purification prayers, the maeza as usual leading off. Exceedingly impressive these purification prayers are, if one will but devoutly refrain from understanding them. I had some of them translated, and am a wiser and sadder man in consequence.
As the chant swelled it sounded like, and yet unlike, some fine processional of the church of Rome. And as it rolled along it touched a chord that waked again the vision of the mountain, and once more before me rose Ontaké, and I saw the long file of pilgrims tramping steadily up the slope.
Intoned in monotone, it was pointed with pantomime, those strange digital contortions, the finger-twists. I suppose to one looking on for the first time nothing about the function would seem so far out of all his world as these same finger-charms. The semi-suppressed vehemence with which the knots are tied, the uncanny look of the knots themselves, and the strange self-abandonment of the performer to the act, produce an effect that is weird in the extreme. Symbolic of bodily action, the force of the originals is felt in these their effigies. A whole drama takes place in them, done by a true magician, as he bids the devils avaunt and calls the good spirits to his aid; and so realistic are the signs, the beings to whom they are addressed grow real, too. Like a talk at a telephone, the half that is heard conjures up of itself the half that is inaudible. And their uncanniness clothes these conjurings with the character of the supernatural. You almost think to see both the devils and the gods.
About them there is a compelling fascination in spite of their repellent uncouthness. If one seek to unravel his sensation from the mesh in which it lies caught, he will find the charm of the thing to consist, I think, in energetic rhythm. For it has something of the cadence of a dance; yet, unlike a dance, it is not pleasing in itself. It is indeed the height of inartistic art; its very uncouthness has a certain grace, the grace of the ungraceful masterfully done.
If such be the force of the charm acting quite simply upon the dispassionate, how great its hold upon the believer, set as it is by the mordant of faith! And then, as chant and charm roll on in their swift processional, suddenly the brass-ringed crosiers (shakujō) ring together in double time, joining with it their jingle as of passing bells.
Prayer after prayer followed thus in purification. Each in turn rose, swelled, and sank only to rise again, in long billows of sound, buoying one's senses to sensations as of the sea, indefinitely vast. Crest after crest swept thus over thought, drowning all reflection in a fathomless feeling of its own. One felt quite contentedly full of nothing at all; in that semi-ecstatic state when discrimination has lapsed into a supreme sense of satisfaction; when the charms seemed as enchanting as the chant, and the chant as charming as the charms. The portal this to the seventh heaven of vacuous content.
A lull like a loud noise broke in upon the half-dream when the maeza stopped to light the pyre. As the flame leaped ceilingward the chant rose with it, the one carrying the other up with it. Tongues of flame three feet high darted ceilingward to transform themselves suddenly into clouds of opal smoke, that, surging, floated off, and then slowly settled down. Through the flame the maeza passed the written sheets emblematic of disease; passed them as usual to and fro unharmed; till, letting each stay still a moment there, it caught and was carried up into the crannies of the room. Many ills of life thus vanished into thin air.
Other things were likewise passed through the flame to gain like virtue; each man thus purified his rosary, with which he afterward rubbed what part of his body he wished to be pure and strong; and finally the gohei itself, for quintessence of purification, was taken from the altar, purified by the fire, and put back in place.
This finished the first service. The incense altar was then removed, sheets of paper were spread on the mats in its stead, and the gohei-wand was taken from the shrine and set upright in the midst. Plain paper! plain pine-wood! plain pilgrim dresses! Truly the neutral tints of self-effacement as near nothing as symbols can well show; the very apotheosis of vacancy.
All the performers except the nakaza now took post for the possession, seating themselves in the prescribed places, facing the gohei; the maeza directly in front of it, the "four heavens" (shiten) at the cardinal points on the side, and the clerk and the deputy maeza flanking the maeza to the left and right.
After a short incantation the maeza removed the wand and gave it to the tōhō, the "eastern heaven," who held it ready in his hand. The nakaza came forward and solemnly seated himself where the gohei had been, facing from the altar. Folding his legs under him, he drew his robe carefully round them, and tied the ends of it together as one would a bundle-handkerchief. The result gave him the look of certain rubber toys of one's extreme childhood, that began as a man and ended in a bulb. After he had thus arranged himself the others did the same.
For such is the conventional Ryōbu-Shintō attitude during possession. Whether this by no means easy pose is modeled after that of the contemplative Buddha, or is merely the exalted seat of old Japan, is doubtful. The two differ in certain technical details of the knot that one ties in one's legs, and the knot is sometimes of the one kind and sometimes of the other. The tying is done to tether the possessed that he may not prove too violent in the trance. For, as may be imagined, the pose is one from which it is next to impossible to rise. Nevertheless, I have seen a god hop round on this his pedestal with astounding agility.
After a little private finger-twisting and prayer, the nakaza folded his hands before him and closed his eyes, the others of course incanting. The maeza took the wand from the tōhō and put it between the nakaza's hands. The man at once fell slowly forward on it, resting one end on the mat and the other against his forehead, near the hollow at the base of the nose.
The others took up in chorus the stirring processional chant known as the rokkon shōjō no harai. As the measured cadence rolled on, suddenly the wand began to quiver; and the chant increased in energy. Moment by moment the wand gathered motion by fits and lulls, as when a storm gathers out of a clear sky. Slowly, as it shook, it rose till it reached his forehead. The Paroxysm came on and then the wand settled with a jerk to a rigid half-arm holding before his brow, a suppressed quiver alone still thrilling it through. The god had come.
The maeza leaned forward, bent low before the outstretched gohei, and reverently asked the god's name. The eyes of the possessed had already opened to the glassy stare typical of trances, the eyeballs so rolled back that the pupils were nearly out of sight. In an unnatural, yet not exactly artificial voice, the god replied, "Matsuwo," at which the maeza bowed low again, and then asked what questions he had previously inquired of me my preference to have put. They were about the health of those beyond the sea, and prognostications for my approaching voyage. All of which were answered with Delphic oracularity; after which the god spoke on of his own accord. He spoke to the maeza but at me; he wished to thank me, he said, for making the ascent of the mountain (Ontaké) two years before. At which divine encomium, considering that the pious are convinced that no foreigner may scale the sacred peak and return alive, I was proportionately pleased.
After delivering himself of this politeness he settled forward heavily into a lethargic swoon. From it he was roused by further incantation to fresh fury. Slowly raising the wand, he suddenly beat the air above his head, and proceeded to hop excitedly round on his folded legs, stopping at each of the four compass points to repeat his performance. Then he came back to his previous commanding pose, and, in reply to the maeza, spoke again.
Once more he relapsed into his lethargy, and once more he was roused, and answered.
When he had fallen into his comatose condition for the third time, the maeza, after a sort of benedicite, made the sign of a Sanskrit character on his back, and slapped him energetically on top of it. One of the four "sides" stood by ready with a cup of water, and, the moment he had come to enough, put it to his lips and helped him to drink. Under this treatment he gradually revived, but it took some kneading before the wand could be loosed from his cataleptic grip.
Three gods, it appeared, had come in turn, which accounted for the rise and fall in the character of the possession: Matsuwō Sama, or O-yama-zumi-no-mikoto, Fukan Gyōja, and Hakkai San.
The last example of the Ryōbu form shall be one typical of the average unpretentious trance, the participants being all simpleminded farmers of the suburbs of Tōkyō. There were five of them, all members of the Five Cardinal Virtues Pilgrim Club. The shrine was the simplest possible, and so was the banquet offered the god. No picture was hung in the recess, and the pyre was not elaborate.
The maeza and nakaza had both been up Ontake more than once; the other three were as yet ascensionless, but hopeful the lot to go might soon fall upon them, their finances having up to date only permitted them to travel so far in fancy.
Purification prayers and purification songs—the misogi no harai, the rokkon shōjō no harai, and the nakatomi no harai—were duly intoned, the nakaza in this case being specially active, because otherwise the leading spirit of the company. All five were clad in their Ontaké ascension robes, although the greater number were simply, as has been said, piously anticipating that event.
The possession itself took place with open eyes, and was interesting only for the rise and fall of its crises. The wand shook frenziedly, settled before the man's face, the god spoke, and then with an agaru, "I ascend," the man fell forward collapsed. The incantation began again, and a second god came down. Five several times this cycle was gone through before the possession was brought to a close and the man waked up. Five separate gods had come in turn.
VI.
The Buddhist trances introduce a new feature in the shape of femininity. For in the Buddhist variety of these divine possessions the god shows a preference for feminine lips.
The first one I was shown was a possession by the Nichiren sect. This is a sect of purely Japanese origin, having been founded by Nichiren, who had learned much of the Shintō priests six hundred years ago,—a sect with no prototype or affiliations elsewhere. It is the Buddhist sect that now chiefly affects possession. In this instance the mouthpiece of the god was the mouth of a maiden, and the man who parleyed with her a mouse-like priest of a certain not unpopular temple.
It too was a parlor possession in my own house, and I have since learned that in consequence of the temple company having been thus invited out to perform, the fame of the temple has gone abroad and its holy trade has amazingly increased.
There were three persons in the company. For with the priest and the maiden, who was about eighteen, came a female friend of maturer years, not indeed to chaperone the fair one so soon to be more than metaphorically divine, but merely to assist at the divine audience. The three all belonged to a certain pilgrim club of which the priest was president.
They appeared with an extra jinrikisha carrying a Saratoga trunk of indispensables. To be fair to the sex, as it shows itself in Japan, it should instantly be said that in this case the baggage was not chargeable to it but to the god's delight in pageantry, as interpreted by the Nichiren sect. The trunk proved to contain several candles, some sakaki a gohei, two large lumps of rice-paste known as kagamimochi, or mirror-dough, various other objects of bigotry and virtue, eight volumes of scripture, vestments, rosary, and ecclesiastical trappings for the priest. He, and not the women, was the object to be arrayed; they, poor things, remained modestly clad in dull indigo blue.
After all these articles had been unpacked and the priest had made a shrine of some of them and had put on the rest, he faced the altar and began to pray. He prayed a long time, an elaborate and beautiful chant in keeping with his clothes. A regrettable absence of finger-charms was made up for by the ingenious way in which he managed to read through the whole eight volumes of scripture. For want of a more consecrated expression it may be known as the way of the concertina, and is as useful as it is artistic. It was made possible by the mode of binding of the books. Like old Japanese books generally, each consisted of a single piece about fifteen yards long, folded for the sake of portability into pages, the ends only being fastened to the covers. Holding them farther apart at the top than at the bottom, he let the pages slowly cascade from his left hand into his right, accompanying himself thus on the holy harmonicon to the chanting of a portion of its contents by heart. The fair ones chorused him at a respectful distance in the rear.
After thus adroitly disposing of his chief devoir, the priest repeated several remembered prayers, not on his rosary, but, as it were, to it. For in the possession ceremony the Japanese Buddhist uses his rosary not as tally to his prayer, but as musical accompaniment to it. As he prays he soothingly strokes it, and it purrs with the gratified responsiveness of a cat.
All this lasted a long while, but the sights and the sounds beguiled the senses to the forgetting of time. When the priest had prayed, in all conscience, enough, he turned at right angles to his former position, and beckoned to the maiden to approach and seat herself opposite to and facing him, sideways, therefore, to the altar. She then folded her hands and closed her eyes.
First he sprinkled her all over with a shower-bath of sparks from a flint and steel; after which he repeated in a soporific way several monotonic chants, and watched the effect. When he judged her numb enough he put the gohei-wand into her hands and continued intoning, his own hands making musical monotone meanwhile on his amber rosary.
Possession came on gradually; the gohei behaving in a becomingly lady-like way, but otherwise as usual. It slowly rose to her forehead, and on reaching it began to shiver. The maiden's eyes stayed closed.
The priest then asked what questions I would like to put to the god. Some doctrinal points occurred to me, the priest acting as spokesman. The god and the priest were pleased with the answers; I was not, their conventionality veiled in vagueness failing to commend itself. Then the god indulged in some gratuitous prophecy, not subsequently fulfilled. He kindly foretold that a week after my return to America I should lose a large amount of money I had loaned. I thanked him for this information, thinking it unnecessary to inform him that I had no money out on loan at the moment, which is perhaps why I never lost it. But I realize that the fault was mine. Had I been a Japanese the chances are overwhelming that most of my property would have been lent; and in that case I should undoubtedly have lost it. This is about as near as I ever came with the gods to successful prophecy. And yet to divine would seem to be of the very essence of divinity.
Altogether the most interesting feature of the case, psychologically, was the great ease of possession, due, as I am convinced, to the sex of the subject. In possessions by the Nichiren sect the god prefers women for embodiment; the only exception being the occasional employment of children as divine subjects. For in this sect men are never possessed.
At another séance by the same sect, four priests and a woman took part. There were no finger-twistings, and the service generally was short and simple. A hanging scroll of Kishibojin was suspended in the recess of honor; while below it a small altar, overlaid with rich brocade, stood flanked by two gohei-wands. The principal priest put on white silk robes, and the woman a white cotton surplice. At first she sat disinterestedly to one side.
At the close of the preliminary service the chief officiator beckoned to her to take .png)
A BUDDHIST DIVINE POSSESSION
Although this is my first mention of pins, I hasten to add that I had already tried them with like innocuous result upon the sterner sex, and I desire to add in self-defense that it was the god, not the woman, that was pricked.
After speaking, the subject lapsed into a comatose condition, but could be roused by being addressed. When the priest had finished with her he took the wands from her hands, not without difficulty, they were so cataleptically clenched, and somewhat irreverently rolled her over on her side, like a doll, into a corner, where he left her to wake, while he and the others finished the service. By the time they were done she came to of herself.
The facing of the possessed—from the altar or simply sideways to it—is a matter dependent on the particular priest and upon the character of the god expected to descend. If the god be of more importance he sits ex cathedra as it were; if not, simply ex parte. This relative disrespect shown by the Buddhists to the possessing gods will be discussed later.
Such are the phenomena of god-possession as practiced by the Nichiren sect. The Shingon sect indulges in a somewhat similar cult, of which I have been told by its priests, but which I do not happen to have seen. The Tendai practices the cult but little, the other sects do not practice it at all. These definite possessions must be carefully distinguished from Buddhist meditation, which also eventually lapses into trance. The first may be defined as a change of one's personality into another's; the second as the etherealization of one's own. In Japan the Zen sect are the greatest adepts in thus losing themselves. Meditating one's self into protoplasmic purity is a specialty of the Buddhists consequent upon the essential tenets of their religion, and has only a distant kinship in common with the purely Japanese Buddhist trances I have described.
VII.
Oldest of all and yet youngest of any of the Japanese possessions are the pure Shintō ones. For they took place in the far past, and then did not take place again till the other day. They form the most interesting branch of the family, because the most un-conventional members of it.
In virtue of being a part of pure Shintō they are necessarily resurrections; although reckless believers now insist that they were always practiced in secret during Shintō's unfortunate unpopularity. If this be really the case, it is a sad instance of keeping a secret too well. For there is no mention made of them during the middle ages. But in a sense they never lapsed. For they survived in Ryōbu—from whose destruction they have phoenix-like emerged, as faithful reproductions of the prehistoric practices as is possible. Being biblical in character, they are invested with a certain archaism that imparts to them all the more seeming sanctity.
The personal auxiliary rites are few and simple; such being explained away on the score of purity. The pure Shintōists are so pure, so they themselves say, that they do not need them. The striking parallelism of this to the Shintō explanation of its lack of a moral code—that only immoral people need moral laws—is instructive. Nevertheless it is quite true that the more faith the less formulae.
The finger-charms, decidedly the most weird of the Ryōbu rites, are reduced to such very low terms as hardly to appear. Of purification prayers only those of pure Shintō origin are recited. Those of Ryōbu fabrication, such as the rokkon shōjō no harai, being carefully ignored.
On the other hand, the impersonal part of the service is elaborate. It has all the formality of the usual state function, for it is nothing more nor less than a divine banquet, with the god himself for after-dinner speaker. The dinner is all-essential to the affair, as it is to all Shintō rites. For the Shintō practice of dining its deities is not confined to the ceremony of possession. Wherever the gods are invoked, for any cause whatsoever, they are induced to descend by the prospect of a dinner. A repast stands perpetually prepared on all Shintō altars; shrines being, to put it irreverently, free-lunch counters for deity, while every Shintō service is but a special banquet given some particular god. One comes to conceive of a Shintō god's life as one continuous round of dining out. To induce an after-dinner mood in a god whom one wishes to propitiate is doubtless judicious.
The rite is, of course, the apotheosis of primitive hospitality. With civilization, however, the divine dinner has, like mere mortal ones, taken on a most tedious etiquette. It consists now of six or seven courses, each of which is ceremoniously long in the serving. The priests, who are the waiters, are all most beautifully dressed, and stand drawn up in a properly impressive row. After a sort of grace, said by the chief officiator, the priest at the lower end of the line hands in, from the refectory behind the scenes, the first of the holy platters, which, with a long, deep bow, he passes up to the next man in the line, who passes it to the third, and so on till it reaches the chief priest, who places it reverently upon the altar. Each dish is thus solemnly offered up to the god and deposited upon the shrine in turn. The dishes consist of almost everything edible, and, considering that much of the food is raw, of everything inedible as well. Wine especially is always on the table, for the gods are anything but teetotalers.
So far as records and traditions make it possible, the aboriginal cult is reinstated. Even the archaic instruments of miscalled music, actual heirlooms, some of them, it is said, in the high-priest's family, are played upon by their modern descendant as they were by his mythologic forbears, that the unchangeable gods may still be pleased. In fact, the whole action is as nearly as possible as it would appear could one be transported a couple of millenniums into the past.
The trance itself is likewise different from its Ryōbu relative. It is more natural and more free. The possessed is not fettered to the conventionality of the Ryōbu forms. He sits, stands, speaks more spontaneously, and generally behaves himself with more of the self-prompting a god might be expected to possess. This, however, is in the believer's eyes of less consequence than the knowledge of the scriptures he displays. In proportion as he is able to elucidate the meagre accounts in the Shintō bibles, does he prove his superior divinity. That the subject has been well trained in this old folk-lore, does not, to the pious, constitute a propter hoc in the matter.
VIII.
Perhaps the most curious phenomenon of the pure Shintō possession-cult is the Kwancho's kindergarten. This is a Sunday-school of a unique kind, held by the high-priest of the Shinshiu sect every other week-day throughout the year, vacations excepted. The instruction is eminently practical, for it consists in teaching nothing less than the art of temporarily becoming god. It is the most esoteric of all the possession practices. To its exercises I was never permitted to bring another foreigner, my own purity just sufficing to admit me.
The school is composed of two classes, a boys' class and a girls' class, made up of the most pious young people of the parish. The boys' class is held first. The pupils begin by taking post in a row at the farther end of the main temple room, while the high-priest faces the altar and conducts a service in which the pupils join. Then he seats himself on one side and nods to a boy to come forward. The boy advances, squats in a divine attitude before the altar, and closes his eyes. After some subdued prayer the priest rises, puts the gohei-wand into the boy's hands, and, resuming his seat, plays sweetly on the sacred flute, exactly as you shall read of its being done in the Kojiki; which is not a surprising coincidence, since the action is copied from it. On advanced pupils the effect is almost instantaneous. The boy goes into convulsions, raises the gohei to arms' length above his head, brandishes it maniacally in the air, and while still doing so rises to his feet and proceeds to dance madly about the room. In the course of his divine antics he contrives to part with the gohei-wand, which he hurls inadvertently into a corner. He then enters upon several gymnastic exercises. First he turns somersaults promiscuously all over the floor. Then a low table is brought out by some of the other pupils and set in the middle of the room, and over this, directed by taps on it from the Kwancho, the possessed somersaults in every possible direction, following in a definite order the compass points. The table is then turned on its side, and he repeats his series of tumbles. The same is next done with the table turned bottom side up; and so forth and so on in pretty much every other position of the furniture. A pupil will sometimes turn thus some seventy somersaults in the the course of one trance. Against the wall stands a ladder, up which the entranced next climbs to the cornice, clinging to which he makes the circuit of the room. Not infrequently he wanders by the same means round all the neighboring apartments. After descending again by the ladder, he performs upon a horizontal bar.
Or he stands on his head up against the wall, first in one corner of the room, and then in another, until he has made the circuit of it, interpolating between times somersaults at his own sweet will. The curriculum varies with the pupil. Though of the same general character for all, it differs in detail for each. But each pupil repeats his own performance exactly, night after night, improving on it through a gradual course of trance-development.
With the girls the action is fittingly less violent. They do not journey along the cornice, but they do turn somersaults over the floor. Their specialty, however, consists in dancing dervish-like round and round the room. The waltzing they keep up indefinitely until stopped by the priest.
All these actions of the pupil mean something. The dance is the facsimile of the one that the goddess Uzume-no-mikoto performed in the first recorded possession. Somersaulting over the floor represents the natural revolution of all things; while somersaulting over the table denotes visits paid to the upper and the under world. Standing on one's head in the corner with one's legs straight up against the wall implies possession by the spirit of a climbing plant.
Before one pupil has finished, a second is started on his career, and then sometimes a third, which, considering the violence of their actions, very decidedly peoples the apartment. The girls are as decent as dervishes, but as to the boys, dancing dervishes are orderly, intelligent members of society by comparison. It is irresponsibility let loose. For they hurl themselves about the apartment with as utter a disregard of others as of themselves. Yet, though they often collide, they seem to regard each other as strictly inanimate things.
Though it is doubtful if they see at all, it is certain that they can hear the Kwancho, who occasionally warns them to be careful. With the exception of thus occasionally addressing them and of tapping the table or the wall, he does not direct their movements in the least. Such half-way stage between hypnotic and possessed action is an interesting thing in itself.
The subject's pulse is accelerated and weakened, so far as I could discover by feeling it immediately afterward.
Though adepts quickly fall into the state, it takes practice to attain to pious proficiency, several sittings being necessary before the pupil is possessed at all.
IX.
We now come to the subjective side of the trance, the first point being the getting into it; the cause, that is, as distinguished from its occasion. Entrance is effected, in fact, in the simplest possible manner. It consists in shutting the eyes and thinking of nothing. From the moment the nakaza takes the gohei-wand into his hands, at which time it will be remembered he closes his eyes, he makes his mind as much of a blank as he can.
The ability to think of nothing—not the simple matter even to the innately empty-headed it might be imagined—has been increased by the previous etherealizing process of the austerities. The routine ritual indulged in just prior to the act, or rather the non-act, furthers this pious result. The repeating of the purification prayers has become so purely mechanical a process that saying them is tantamount to not thinking. Nakaza, quite unmindful of the doubtful propriety of the remark, have informed me that the two are the same thing. They do not think of anything, they say, after they have once sat down to the ceremony, though they are, patently, as busy as they can be reeling off the prayers. So true is this that a nakaza will at times begin to go off inopportunely in the midst of the preliminary rites and have to be brought back from his divine digression by a rousing cuff from the maeza.
Some nakaza, in order the easier to enter the trance, rest one end of the gohei-wand upon the ground, and, leaning forward, throw their weight upon the other, pressed against the forehead at the base of the nose between the eyes. The act is thought to be helpful to a speedy possession. It is an interesting fact that this zone hypnotique should have been discovered experimentally by the Japanese long before the thing was scientifically known to Europe. Not all subjects, however, make use of it. Some simply rest one end of the wand on the floor and then lean upon it; some do not even rest it on the floor, but hold it before them in the air. These various devices are matter of traditional practice with particular pilgrim clubs.
Easy as vacuity gets to be to those who can give their whole mind to it, the acquisition of such capacity is by no means an instantaneous affair, as the history of one earnest applicant for emptiness from his first failure to his first success will suffice to show.
After having duly reduced himself by protracted austerities to sufficient abstraction, he was set one evening in the nakaza's seat. Ranged round him sat the regular company incanting. He closed his eyes and the gohei-wand was put into his hands. From that moment he tried to make his mind as blank as possible. The result the first evening was simple nausea. It is not, perhaps, to be wondered at, that his first dose of divinity should disagree with a man.
The man's second attempt the following evening led to a like sickening result, but the unpleasant effect was a thought less acute. So it was on the third evening and the fourth, and in this half-seas-over state between man and god he continued to remain for fifteen consecutive nights, the nausea less at each repetition of its cause. At last, at the fifteenth sitting, his perseverance was rewarded. He entered the holy ring as usual and remembers hearing the others repeating the prayers fainter and yet more faint, like singers departing into the distance, and then he was aware of being rudely and irrelevantly shaken by the rest. They were bringing him to. Possession had been like the unconscious dropping off to sleep; coming to himself again like waking in the morning, only that he felt dull and tired. He was told by the company that he had nodded, brandished the wand, and become perfectly rigid.
Subjects, when catechized more curiously as to the feeling of lapsing into the trance, indulged in variously opposite analogies. One likened it to the sensation that creeps over a man after long immersion in the honrable hot water, a luxurious soaking in a bath of the parboiling temperature of one hundred and ten degrees or more Fahrenheit; a simile by some degrees too ardent to convey much idea of insensibility to Europeans, but which commends itself as expressive to Japanese. Another individual said it felt like going up in a balloon. This daringly inflated simile turned out a pure flight of fancy, as on further questioning it appeared that the speaker had never been up in one. But, inasmuch as his audience had not either, his definition was considerably more definite than if he had made ever so many ascents. A third man averred that it was like being drowned and then being brought to life again; a clever hit, this, though I have no reason to suppose that he had had, any more than the other, personal experience of his comparison. Still another described all sounds as seeming to go a long way off; while a last adept said that when he lapsed into the supreme of meditation, a condition akin to that of being possessed, ordinary noises ceased to be audible, and yet in winter he could hear the water freeze.
Of the trance itself most, if not all, of the possessed remember afterwards nothing. One man indeed said that it was like dreaming, only more vague,—the dream of a dream, which certainly is very vague, indeed. Even here I think he mistook the feelings fringing the trance state for the trance state itself. For certainly the average good nakaza is quite emphatic on the point, and this particular man was not a specially able specimen.
All agree in the sense of oppression which is their last bit of consciousness before going off and their first on coming to. It is for this the maeza slaps the nakaza repeatedly on the back at and after the moment of waking. The throat is so throttled that unless this were done the water could not be swallowed. As for the water itself, it is taken for much the same reason that some people take it when about to swallow a pill, to overcome, that is, the involuntary contraction of the glottis.
Possession begins, they, say, at the gohei. The hands that hold it are the first parts of the man to be possessed. In the incipient cases they are all that are visibly affected. As the control deepens the cataleptic condition creeps, on like paralysis, till it involves all of the body not actually in use by the god.
Possession ends much as it begins. The subject's arms and hands are the last part of him to lose their induced catalepsy. After the man is well waked and to all intents and purposes himself again, it is difficult to take the wand away from him. Only after being rubbed and kneaded will the fingers let go their hold.
In the trance itself the anaesthesia is usually marked. I have repeatedly stuck pins into the entranced at favorably sensitive spots without the god's being aware of the pricks. In some cases, however, where I had otherwise no reason to suspect fraud, the pin was felt. So that apparently want of feeling is not invariably produced in the state; but it is certainly a usual concomitant of it.
The pulse is quickened to a varying extent. This appears to be rather a symptom of the entrance into the state than of the trance itself, and is doubtless due to the exertion and excitement of the preliminary rites. The significant symptom of the actual possession is the pulse's very decided weakening. The performers themselves state that it stops. It comes very near it. I have explored the wrist of an entranced during possession for a long time only to find an occasional flutter But the most important feature of this failure of the pulse consists in the way in which it keeps step inversely with the rise in the activity of the possession. The pulse grows feeble in proportion as the trance action grows strong, and tends to go out completely when possession attains its height. When the subject falls forward into his comatose condition the pulse returns. The performers themselves are perfectly aware of this reciprocal relation between the man's vitality and the god's. When the entranced's pulse was being felt I have known a whole company to redouble the energy of their incantation in order thus to keep the possession at its height and so cause the pulse to go out.
During the height of the possession the subject's body is in constant subdued quiver; evidence of the same nervous thrill that produces the initial spasm. Not till the comatose condition comes on does this cease. And it is capable of being revived to greater or less fury by reincantation, at any moment.
At the time the subject consigns himself to vacating his bodily premises he shuts his eyes, thus closing the shutters of the house his spirit is so soon to leave; and the blinds stay drawn till the spirit has passed away and the coming on of the spasm indicates the advent of the god. At his entrance the eyelids are, in some cases, raised again (gambiraki), revealing that glassy stare peculiar to the trance; in others they still remain drawn. Which they shall do is matter of tradition in the subject's pilgrim club. If the eyes open—as also doubtless if they do not—the eyeballs are rolled up so that the iris is half out of sight; the lids quiver but never wink. By those who open their eyes, the not doing so is denounced as conducive to shams. It is certainly easier to sham with the eyes shut, if indeed the peculiar look of an entranced's eye can be counterfeited at all. Nevertheless, such as shut their eyes to the act deem their way equally convincing.
Beside opening or not-opening his eyes in the trance, dependent upon the habit of his club, the subsequent action of the possessed is otherwise conventional. The behavior of one god bears a striking family likeness to that of another. Each begins by brandishing maniacally the gohei-wand, and after sufficient flourish brings it down to the commanding holding before the brow which betokens that he is ready to be interviewed. He is then invariably first asked his name, which would seem to be a polite formality, since god-experts say they can tell which god has come by the manner alone in which he brandishes the gohei-wand. Gods are as easily told apart as men, when you know them. Their general resemblance is due to their divinity; their slight individuality is their own.
The conventional character of the actions of the entranced is of course no sign of shamming. To mistake such for fraud is to be one's own dupe. His actions are but the unconscious assimilation of precedent become stereotyped into trance habit, just as artless a thing as any every-day habit. One might make a more serious mistake and take for necessary symptoms of the Japanese trance these mere adventitious adjuncts of it, due to auto-suggestion at first and then perpetuated unintentionally, as the Salpétrière did with those it first innocently induced in its hypnotic patients, and then as innocently marveled at afterward. Some symptoms, nevertheless, are quite universal—those connected with the gohei-wand. The way in which this is treated is common to pure Shintō, Ryōbu-Shintō, and Buddhist performance alike, the action only differing in degree. On the other hand, the tying up of the legs of the entranced is essentially a Ryōbu practice, not being a detail of the higher forms of pure Shintō possession nor of that of the women subjects of the Buddhists.
Shamming is not so important a matter as it might seem, because of its ease of detection. Shams there are, of course, which is scarcely surprising when we consider the great vogue the act of possession enjoys. But such are easily exploded. An unexpected pin in a tender part of the possessed's body instantly does the business. For a god is sublimely superior to being made a pin-cushion of, while a mere man invariably objects to it. The difficulty, indeed, lies not in detecting the counterfeit but in failing to detect the reality. To a sufficiently incredulous eye the sham very rarely masquerades successfully, while the genuine article, if very perfect, often seems too good to be true. Especially is this the case with woman. One doubts her divinity at the time only to realize afterward that he has done the lady an injustice.
Though the god in these incarnations is thus born, not made, he has after birth to go through a natural process of development to reach his full capabilities.
His gradual self-education would be interesting to witness did it not take so long. The history of a boy about ten and a half years old whom I was privileged to observe in the course of his divine education will give some idea of the laboriousness of the process. He began practicing to be possessed on July 17; that is he was then first set in the nakaza's seat, and the gohei-wand put into his hands while he shut his eyes and tried to make his mind as blank as possible. This performance he went through five times every day from that time on, twice in the morning and three times at night. It was at the end of August when the god at last descended and possessed him. At first the god did nothing but brandish the gohei-wand. Gradually he learned to grunt. When I first saw the boy in the latter part of September, the god had got far enough along to grunt quite imposingly. I saw him again on October 28. The sounds had taken on some form. He could then articulate so that you thought he spoke what it was your fault not to understand. By the middle of November, I was told, he would speak distinctly.
The development of the voice is always an acquired art; dumb possession preceding the ability to converse in the trance. It takes the god no inconsiderable time to learn to talk. When he does do so the tone is peculiar. It is not the man's natural voice, but a stilted, cothurnus sort of voice, one which a god might be supposed to use in addressing mere mortals. It would be theatrical were it not sincere. It is the man's unconscious conception of how a god should talk, and commends itself artistically to the imagination.
The possessory gods present certain interesting characteristics. In the first place they are of either sex. This follows from the fact that in Japan sex suffers no social restrictions among the gods, as in olden times it suffered none among men. Goddesses are both numerous and influential. Practically the highest god in the Shintō pantheon is a lady, the Sun-Goddess Ama-terasu-o-mikami. The earth deity worshiped as the principal god at the second Ise shrine is also a goddess. For in Shintō is realized the idea of the advanced woman's right's wife, who, on sending her husband shopping one day to match a piece of ribbon, said to him, as a parting injunction, "If you are in doubt, pray to God, and She will help you."
Woman continued a power after she had ceased to be divine. Japanese history boasts of several empresses who, chivalry apart, have played on the whole its most prominent parts. The Empress Jingo is perhaps the most striking figure in the imperial line, not excluding her son, who was canonized as the god of war.
When it comes to possession it is there fore not surprising that femininity should be found to have a hand in it. In the olden time both possessors and possessees were notably of the sex, as we shall see when we come to examine the Shintō bibles later.
Nowadays possession is chiefly confined to males on both sides. Still there are plenty of exceptions in both parties to the business. It is not uncommon for a goddess to descend sandwiched in between a lot of gods. In such event the voice of the entranced changes to suit the sex. The sex of the subject does not seem to signify; goddesses not being particularly partial to men, nor particularly averse to their own sex. Male deities usually descend upon both sexes indifferently, simply because they are more numerous than female ones.
Sex, however, is not surprising in divinity. But there is one point about these possessory gods in which they come much nearer being unique, and in which they are certainly not specially feminine—in their willingness to share their subject. Shintō possessions are remarkable for the multiplicity of gods that deign to descend in one and the same trance. Such divine copartnership is of course successive, since otherwise it would not be personal possession at all, but a mere composite blur of divinity, quite unrecognizable for anybody in particular. The communistic character of the possession is as singular as the constituents to it are many. Rarely does one god monopolize the trance. Usually from three to a dozen descend in turn. As each descends, the activity of the possession rises from lethargy to somnambulistic action; the possessed acts, speaks, is the god. Then, when the god departs, he sinks forward into a comatose condition from which the next god rouses him. Each god stays but five minutes or so, and this five-minute rule in speaking produces a wave-like rise and fall, in the character of the possession, by which it becomes possible to count the number of the divine visitors.
Contrary to what might be thought probable, the same god very rarely, if ever, returns in the same trance. To have come once, instead of being reason for coming again is reason for the reverse, which certainty shows a praiseworthy regard on the part of the god not to monopolize his subject.
Although neither the subject nor any one else knows beforehand what particular gods will descend in any one trance, a certain clique of gods usually frequents any one man. What the divine set shall be depends upon what gods the man is intimate with in his normal state. One man's familiar spirits will thus consist of the various Inari, gods of agriculture; another's of defunct and deified gyōja, pious hermits who lived much in the mountains, and are particularly familiar with the peaks; a third's of the higher Shintō divinities. Each is visited by his intimates; his pious proclivities determining with whom he may stand upon calling terms.
Such an impersonal thread of godhead upon which each particular god's personality is strung, running in this manner through the trance, reveals very strikingly the peculiar characteristic of these people—their impersonality. It shows how deep ingrained that impersonality is, that after his sense of self has entirely left the man, the essential quality of that self, its lack of it, still lingers behind. It reminds one in a serious way of the problem of the sand-bank with the hole in it. The sea comes up and washes away the sand-bank; does the hole remain? Here apparently it does. For though vacuity alone is left to be filled by deity, the form of that vacuity reappears in the god. The mould is still there to shape the new tenant after all that was moulded in it has crumbled away.
So closes my presentation of the phenomena of this strange possession-cult. Before passing on to interpret the noumena behind them, there remains to be given some account of a custom intimately associated with them, the pilgrim clubs. After that properly comes the proof of their essentially Japanese character. But I cannot take my leave of the phenomena themselves without hoping there may linger with the reader some impression, however faint, of the simple beauty of the Shintō faith. For in an emotional sense it is the very essence of what makes far-eastern life so fine. Mere outline of a faith as Shintō at first sight seems to be, on closer study it proves to be something little less than grand in its very simplicity. Truly it needs no formal priesthood, no elaborate service, no costly shrine, for it has as visibly about it something better than all these—its very gods. To Shintō they are always there; and the great cryptomeria groves no longer seem untenanted, the plain, bare buildings no longer lack a host; for at any instant they may be pervaded by a presence, the presence of the incarnate spirit of the god.
