the two sides are so alike—to those applications among European and some other peoples.[1]
We need, I think, hardly doubt that the main basis of the Japanese employment of the broom as a magical implement lies in its power for cleansing. By means of a broom there may be swept away all manner of small physical impurities, which, powerless to escape it, are pushed out of its way or become entangled within its almost innumerable arms. What then should be more natural than that the broom be believed to be efficacious in the clearing away or the rendering powerless of spectral or of psychical impurities, both such as dwell in or normally hover near to the physical objects of the broom's activities, and such as—whether personified as supernatural beings or regarded merely as vaguely defined causes of evil — are looked upon as being wholly disembodied? However tenuous and impalpable it may be, how can spirit or ghost or demon hope to pass unharmed through the intricate thicket of rods forming the operative portion of a broom? The thoughtful believer in invisible supernatural beings can observe smoke or mist, subtile as the air itself, clinging about the brush of a broom or entangled among its parts; how, if his education does not permit him to conceive of anything more tenuous than the air about him, can he then fail to believe that supernatural beings must beware and fiee, lest they find themselves in its path, to be caught and perchance injured by the twigs or stalks of which the brush is composed } The employment in Japan of the broom as a means for supernatural cleansings seems as if based upon conceptions similar to those underlying the very ancient Japanese practice of washing as a means of ritual purification,[2] and as if in some degree similar to the
