CREED AND CASTE
the peasant prays. The go-hei, or sacred offering, takes the form of a wand supporting a pendant of paper zigzags. It represents the coarse cloth and fine cloth that always appeared among the offerings. From symbolising the concrete devotion of the worshipper and its abstract acceptance by the deity, the go-hei became, by an easily conceived transition, an evidence of the favouring presence of the worshipped spirit, and in that character acquired powers of inspiration the exercise of which has been made the basis of a theory of esoteric Shintō.[1]
From what has already been said about the "rough spirit" and the "gentle spirit," the reader will not be surprised to find in Shintō practices a repetition of the phenomenon that has puzzled so many minds, from the days of Njal and his forspan to those of Charcot and second sight. The aura epileptica blew in the old Japan and still blows in the new, as it has blown among all nations in all ages. Before Shintō shrines one may constantly see examples of what some folks call "mountain-moving faith," and others more prosaically regard as an abnormal mood produced by concentrated attention and abeyance of the will, namely, unconscious cerebration, taking the form of a hypnotic trance with telepathic capabilities, wonderful and inscrutable to vulgar minds. These "spirit-possessions" find their prototype in the phrensy of the goddess that
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- ↑ See Appendix, note 27.
