This is the logical sequence; but it by no means follows that all Gods of individuals precede all Gods of classes, or that there were no deities of abstractions before some of the later individual or class deities were evolved.
The distinction between individual objects deified and deities of classes is not always well maintained in Shinto. It is doubtful, for example, whether Kamado no Kami is the God of all cooking furnaces, or whether there is a separate God for each. Different worshippers might give different answers. The habitual neglect by the Japanese nation of the grammatical distinction between singular and plural is a potent obstacle to clearness in such matters.
Phases of Conception.—The conception of individual parts of the universe as deities passes through the phases represented in the following formulas:—
- The Sun (Moon, Wind, Sea, &c.) is alive.
- The Sun is a man, a father, a chief or a king—first rhetorically, and then literally.
- The Sun is a material object, ruled by an unseen but not incorporeal being with human form and passions.
- The Sun is (a) a material object ruled by an anthropomorphic being which has a spiritual double, or (b) is animated by a spiritual being.
These formulas exhibit the logical sequence of development. In practice the various phases are found to overlap one another considerably. Even in the latest Shinto the direct conception of the natural object as alive is not forgotten.
The first stage,[1] in which we have the religious conception before it is clothed in myth or metaphor, is abundantly exemplified in Shinto. A well, for example, is, like Horace's "Fons Bandusiæ," worshipped without name or myth attached to it, or anything to show whether it is regarded as male or female. The same is the case with
- ↑ Max Müller speaks of "that ancient stratum of thought which postulated an agent in the sky, the sun, &c." This is really a secondary conception.
