an injury to his pretended likeness. How the change here assumed came about, from the employment of the broom as an active agent to its employment as a passive agent, it is difficult to say. It seems not improbable, however, that words or actions would be used at first for the purpose of indicating to the broom the direction in which there was a desire that its powers should be applied,[1] and that later, because of people's familiarity with the majinai in which a likeness is to be injured, the broom-using operations came to be looked upon as forms of such majinai, and perhaps were altered slightly in order to make them conform more closely to the new ideas which had come to be conceived to underlie them. It may be, too, that superior and more widespread education had an effect in causing the change which seems to have occurred, because the idea that an effect may be produced upon a person by doing something to a thing representing him is one which is likely to survive into a later stage of culture than one according to which a common household implement is regarded as containing a more or less powerful spirit. Confusions similar to that which seems to have occurred here are, I believe, by no means uncommon in Japanese popular magic—indeed, it would be strange if they did not exist amongst a people who were accustomed to attribute the courses of events of every kind to supernatural agencies, and who, while they nowadays seek a rational interpretation in order to explain a custom or a practice the reason for which has become obscure, in former times found for it and fitted an explanation based on supernatural agencies.
A case which I believe to be very similar, so far as its history is concerned, to that of the guest-removing majinai we have been discussing, is that of the picture of the Hashiri Daikoku. This picture, representing the divinity
- ↑ Compare "The Directing of Conscious Agents in some Japanese 'Imitative' Magical Practices."
