Shinto: The Way of the Gods/Chapter 2

by W. G. Aston

CHAPTER II.

GENERAL FEATURES.—PERSONIFICATION.

Religion.—Religion, a general term which includes all our relations to the Divine, is a cord of three strands, namely, Emotion, Thought, and Conduct. Emotion comprises gratitude, hope, and fear. Thought yields conceptions and beliefs. Religious conduct consists in doing that which is pleasing to the superior powers, and in refraining from acts which are thought to be offensive to them. It includes worship, purity, and morality.

These elements of religion are inseparable. Emotion stimulates and sharpens the intellectual faculties, which in turn provide fresh food for emotion. Each without the other is evanescent and barren. Nothing worthy of the name of religion is possible without a long succession of alternate moods of thought and feeling.

Emotion and thought lead in all healthy minds to action of some sort. Man is impelled by his very nature to testify his gratitude to the powers on which he feels himself dependent, to express his hopes of future blessings from them, and to avoid acts which might offend them. Moreover, as a social animal, he is prompted to communicate his religious thoughts and feelings to his fellow men. Without such intercommunication, no religion is possible. No individual man ever evolved a religion out of his own inner consciousness alone.

Emotional Source of Religion.—The emotional basis of religion is gratitude, love, and hope, rather than fear. If life is worth living—and what sane man doubts it?—there are necessarily far more frequent occasions for the former than for the latter. The statement of the old Roman poet that "Primus in orbe Deus fecit timor" is untrue even of the Greek and Roman mythology to which he more particularly referred. Zeus, the Shining One, the Father of Gods and Men, though he may occasionally destroy a wicked man with his thunder, is loved rather than feared. "Alma Venus, hominum divomque voluptas," is not the offspring of our terrors. Nor is Ceres, Bacchus, Here Eileithuia, or Kora. In Mars, by an exception the malignant quality predominates.

Shinto is essentially a religion of gratitude and love. The great Gods, such as the Sun-Goddess and the Deity of Food, are beneficent beings. They are addressed as parents, or dear divine ancestors, and their festivals have a joyous character.^[1] An eighth-century poet says, "Every living man may feast his eyes with tokens of their love." The Kogoshiui tells us that when the Sun-Goddess emerged from her cave, "Heaven above at length became clear, and all people could see each other's faces distinctly. They stretched forth their hands and danced and sang together, exclaiming, 'Oh! how delightful! how pleasant! how clear!'" The Nihongi says that on the same occasion all the Gods rejoiced greatly. Have we not here a rudiment of the beatific vision which in its higher developments embraces not only the sunlight but all things in Heaven and earth, and hell itself, founded, as Dante says, by the primo Amore? Even the boisterous Rain-Storm God, who of the Dii Majores most nearly approaches the type of an evil deity, has his good points. The demons of disease and calamity are for the most part obscure and nameless personages.

Intellectual Basis of Religion. The Idea of God.—A God may be defined as a sentient being possessed of superhuman power. The phrase "supernatural being," which is sometimes used as equivalent to God, is open to objection. The word "supernatural" belongs to the vocabulary of a comparatively scientific age. To the savage, phenomena are ordinary or strange, not natural or supernatural. Moreover, there are many objects of worship which are not at all supernatural, as, for instance, the sun. "Spiritual being" is insufficiently comprehensive as an equivalent for God. The Lama of Tibet is a God; but he is not a spiritual being. Neither is the Wind nor the Moon. The assumption that Gods are always spirits has been the source of much confusion.

Kami.—The most common and comprehensive word for deity in the Japanese language is Kami. It is probably connected with kaburu, to cover, and has the general meaning of "above," "superior." Kami is the part of Japan which lies near the capital, as opposed to Shimo, the lower country or provinces. Kaha-kami means the upper waters of a river. Kami no ke, or simply kami, is the hair of the head. Kami is applied not only to Gods, but to Mikados and nobles. The heads of State Departments were at one time called Kami, and in later times this word became equivalent to our "Lord" in territorial titles. O Kami is frequently said vaguely of "the authorities," while O Kami San is the domestic authority, namely, "the mistress." Whether Kami is used of Gods or men, it is in both cases a secondary application of the general meaning "upper." The Gods are Kami because they reside in Heaven (superi, caelicoli, Όυρανίωνες, Most High, Father in Heaven); men are Kami on account of their higher rank. No doubt both gain prestige by their association under the same title—the Gods by a reflection from the pomp and ceremony which attend on mortal Kami; and men by assimilation with the transcendent power and glory of the great nature-deities.

Why should height come to be everywhere associated with excellence and rank? Herbert Spencer's characteristic contribution^[2] to the solution of this problem is as follows: "In battle it is important to get the force of gravity to fight on your side, and hence the anxiety to seize a position above that of the foe. Conversely the combatant who is thrown down cannot further resist without struggling against his own weight as well as against his antagonist's strength. Hence being below is so habitually associated with defeat as to have made maintainance of this relation (literally expressed by the words superior and inferior) a leading element in ceremony at large." To this it may be added that the upper part of the human body—namely, the head—is also the most important and honourable. "Chief" is derived from caput: "capital," as an adjective, means excellent. "Headman," "head-centre," "head and front of my offending," are familiar phrases which involve the assumption of the superior importance of the head. A Japanese raises to his head a present or other object to which he wishes to show respect. A further and decisive consideration is the circumstance that the most incomparably glorious, excellent, and majestic thing with which we are acquainted is also immeasurably the highest. Even pre-religious man cannot have been wholly insensible to the glory of the sky—"hoc sublime candens"—with its sun and moon, its dawns and sunsets, its clouds, thunders, and storms. No wonder that the words heavenly and celestial have come to convey the idea of supreme excellence.

The following quotations will help us to realize more fully what the Japanese mean by the word Kami. Motoöri says:—

"The term Kami is applied in the first place to the various deities of Heaven and Earth who are mentioned in the ancient records as well as to their spirits (mi-tama) which reside in the shrines where they are worshipped. Moreover, not only human beings, but birds, beasts, plants and trees, seas and mountains, and all other things whatsoever which deserve to be dreaded and revered for the extraordinary and pre-eminent powers which they possess, are called Kami. They need not be eminent for surpassing nobleness, goodness, or serviceableness alone. Malignant and uncanny beings are also called Kami if only they are the objects of general dread.^[3] Among Kami who are human beings I need hardly mention first of all the successive Mikados—with reverence be it spoken...... Then there have been numerous examples of divine human beings, both in ancient and modern times, who, although not accepted by the nation generally, are treated as gods, each of his several dignity, in a single province, village, or family...... Amongst Kami who are not human beings I need hardly mention Thunder [in Japanese Naru kami or the Sounding God]. There are also the Dragon, the Echo [called in Japanese Ko-dama or the Tree Spirit], and the Fox, who are Kami by reason of their uncanny and fearful natures. The term Kami is applied in the Nihongi and Manyōshiu to the tiger and wolf. Izanagi gave to the fruit of the peach and to the jewels round his neck names which implied that they were Kami...... There are many cases of seas and mountains being called Kami. It is not their spirits which are meant. The word was applied directly to the seas^[4] or mountains themselves as being very awful things." Hirata defines kami as a term which comprises all things strange, wondrous, and possessing isao or virtue. A recent dictionary gives the following essentially modern definitions of this word:—

Kami. 1. Something which has no form but is only spirit, has unlimited supernatural power, dispenses calamity and good fortune, punishes crime and rewards virtue. 2. Sovereigns of all times, wise and virtuous men, valorous and heroic persons whose spirits are prayed to after their death. 3. Divine things which transcend human intellect. 4. The Christian God, Creator, Supreme Lord.

Double Current of Religious Thought.—If we accept the definition of a God as a sentient being possessed of superhuman power, it follows that the idea of God may be arrived at in two ways. We may ascribe sense to those superhuman elemental powers of whose action we are daily witnesses, or we may reverse this process and endow sentient beings, especially men, with powers which they do not actually possess. In other words, the idea of God may be arrived at either by personification or by deification.

Strictly speaking, the first of these processes is the only legitimate one. The second involves the assumption that man may be or may become God. But without questioning the reality of an intimate union of the human with the divine, both in this world and the next, it is better to maintain a clear distinction between these two terms. Ultimately, after the errors of anthropomorphism, polytheism, and spiritism have been eliminated, the two methods of arriving at the idea of God yield the substantially identical formulas:—

A. God = infinite power + absolute humanity.

B. God = absolute humanity + infinite power.

But in the stage of religious progress represented by Shinto, we are far indeed from such a result.

The priority of the second of these two processes has been assumed or contended for by many writers, notably by Herbert Spencer. Others argue that there can be no deification until the idea of deity has somehow been arrived at previously, as for example, by the personification of natural powers. It appears to me impossible to say which of the two comes first in order of time. The germs of both may be observed at a stage of intellectual development prior to all religion. Children, as we have all observed, sometimes personify inanimate objects. I have known a boy of three years of age complain that, "Bad mustard did bite my tongue." The baby who cries for the moon credits his nurse—ignorantly, of course—with powers far transcending those of humanity. The argument that there can be no deification without a previous acquaintance with the idea of deity loses sight of the circumstance that deity is a compound conception, which combines the ideas of great power and sense. Of these two a man has sense already. To make him a God all that is necessary is to ascribe to him transcendent power. Deification, therefore, does not necessarily imply a previous knowledge of the conception of deity. In practice, however, men are usually deified by being raised to the level of already known deities.^[5]

Each of these two processes rests on a basis of truth. The personification of natural objects and powers springs from some glimmering notion that the so-called inanimate world is really alive. Everything physical has its metaphysical counterpart. There is no motion without something akin to sensation, and no sensation without motion. As all our sensations, emotions, and thoughts are accompanied by corresponding disturbances of the molecules of our brain and nervous system, so all natural phenomena have associated with them something varying in quality and intensity, for which our human language has no better word than sensation, while along with the sum of the infinitely interwoven physical energies of the universe there goes what we, in our imperfect speech, must call emotion, purpose, thought.

Ordinarily the lower animal, the child, the savage, and the primitive man do not realize this truth. Under the pressure of imperious practical necessities they recognize with sufficient accuracy the difference between the animate and the inanimate. They do not take the further step of seeing that there is animation in the so-called inanimate. Sense and volition are not habitually attributed by them to inanimate objects. Much less do they assume, as we are sometimes told, the presence in them of a conscious agent not visible to the senses. There are, however, exceptions to this rule. Some of these are simple mistakes. I have known a dog take a doll for a living person, and only discover his error after close examination and long consideration. A large stone-ware image of the Buddhist Saint Daruma, of stern aspect, which stood in my garden in Tōkiō, caused unmistakable alarm to stray dogs who unexpectedly found themselves face to face with it. Children sometimes beat inanimate objects by which they have been hurt, and savages have been known to regard a watch as a living being.

A second exception is the case of conscious make-believe, of which we may observe instances in the play of children, and even of the lower animals. Errors and fancies of this kind do not constitute religion, though they may prepare the way for it. A time comes, however, when some savage or primitive man, gifted beyond his fellows, arrives at a partial and hesitating recognition of the truth that with the energies of nature there really goes something of the same kind that he is conscious of in himself, and has learned to recognize in his fellow beings—namely, sense and will. He sees the sun move across the heavens, diffusing light and warmth, and says to himself, "He is alive." With the intellectual perception there is associated emotion. He feels that the sun is kind to him, and bows his head as he would to his chief, partly to express his thanks and partly in order that others may share his thoughts and feelings. This is religion. It comprises the three elements of thought, emotion, and action. Religion is at first exceptional. Every primitive man is not a seer or maker of religious myth. His ordinary attitude towards the powers of nature is that of the Chinaman, who thought that the moon was "all the same lamp pigeon." He is an unconscious Agnostic, and knows nothing of volition in the inanimate world.

The deification of men, although involving a contradiction in terms, has yet a substantial and most important truth associated with it. Great captains, wise rulers, inspired poets, sages and seers, whether alive or dead, deserve honour to which it is not easy to place a limit. Napoleon said that one of his generals was worth an army division. Who shall estimate the value to their respective races, and, indeed, to humanity, of such men as Shakespeare, Confucius, Mahomet, or Buddha? Nor are they dead. They live in their works, and subjectively in the hearts and minds of their countrymen. And may we not go a step further? Our actions, even the most insignificant, do not remain locked up in ourselves. As by sensation the whole universe affects us, so does every impulse of our ego react upon the universe, leaving an impression which is indelible. The physical world is different for the most trifling act of the meanest human being that ever lived. All our emotions and thoughts have a counterpart in our physical constitution, which is resolvable into motion, and is therefore indestructible. The doctrine of the conservation of energy is the physical counterpart of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Each involves the other. Assuming, therefore, that all motion is accompanied by something akin to sensation, it will be seen that dead men may continue to have perhaps even a sentient existence equal to the sum of the reactions of their ego upon its environment, animate or inanimate, during life. It is the remembered total energies of the man which, I take it, form the object of honour and worship after he is dead, and not his corpse or ghost. The latter is a mere accident, of secondary origin, and is by no means universally recognized.

In justification of man-worship, it may also be pleaded that if the nature-deity is truer, the man-deity is nearer to us and more capable of vivid realization. And as it is from the sympathetic recognition of life in our fellow men that we proceed to the recognition of life in the so-called inanimate universe, so it is by the contemplation of the highest types of humanity that we are able to refine and exalt our conception of divinity.

The two great sources of religious thought, personification and deification, are constantly intermingling their streams and reacting upon each other. A deity who begins his career as a Nature-God often in course of time loses this quality, and becomes hardly distinguishable from a magnified man. The Zeus of Homer is an example. He is much more the Father of Gods and men than a Sky or Weather-God. In Japan it is only the scholar who recognizes in Susa no wo the deity of the Rain-storm. To the people even Tenshōdaijin (the Sun Goddess) is nothing more than the great providential deity who resides at Ise. Her solar quality is practically forgotten. Men, on the other hand, may be exalted to such a height by the ascription to them of nature-powers that their original humanity is much obscured.

It is sometimes difficult to determine to which of the two currents of religious thought a particular deity belongs. For example, we find a sword worshipped as a deity. Is it on account of its wonderful cutting property, or because it was once an offering to a nature or a man-deity, and had therefore at length absorbed to itself a portion of his divinity? Or is it the Excalibur of some forgotten deified chieftain? There is no general answer to such questions. They must be decided, if at all, by the evidence in each case. To call objects of this kind "fetishes" helps us nothing. In the Yengishiki we find mention of a shrine to Iha no hime (the lady of the rock). At first sight this looks like a Nature-God. But when we find that an Iha no hime was the mother of the Mikado Richiu (end of fourth century) it seems more probable that the Iha no hime of this shrine was a deified mortal.

In Shinto it is the first of the two great currents of religious thought with which we are chiefly concerned. It is based much more on the conception—fragmentary, shallow, and imperfect as it is—of the universe as sentient than on the recognition of pre-eminent qualities in human beings, alive or dead. It springs primarily from gratitude to—and, though in a less degree, fear of—the great natural powers on which our existence depends. The desire to commemorate the virtues and services of great men and to perpetuate a loving remembrance of departed parents and forefathers takes a secondary place.

Classification of Deities.—Both Nature-Gods and Man-Gods may be deities of individuals, of classes, or of abstract qualities. We have, therefore, six classes of Gods, as follows:—

 

Nature-Gods.

Individuals, as the Sun.

Classes, as the God of Trees.

Properties, as the God of Growth.

 

Man-Gods.

Individuals, as Temmangu.

Classes, as Koyane.

Properties, as Ta-jikara no wo (Hand-strength-male).

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:—

1. The Sun (Moon, Wind, Sea, &c.) is alive.
2. The Sun is a man, a father, a chief or a king—first rhetorically, and then literally.
3. The Sun is a material object, ruled by an unseen but not incorporeal being with human form and passions.
4. 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,^[6] 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 sites, buildings, provinces, trees, all of which are deified and have religious rites in their honour without any very definite personality being attributed to them. They are simply thought of as in some sort of way living things. Mud and sand are dubbed Kami, and there the personification ends. There are a good many colourless deities of this kind in Shinto. Motoöri declares explicitly that when a sea or a mountain is called Kami, it is not the spirit of the sea or mountain which is meant, but the sea or mountain itself. A poet of the Manyoshiu says of Fujiyama:—

Of Yamato, the Land of Sunrise,
It is the peace-giver, it is the God,
It is the treasure.

When a kitchen wench at the present day speaks of the Hettsui-sama—sama is a honorific and personifying word—she means the cooking-furnace itself regarded as a God, not a spirit inhabiting it. She will even speak of the plasterer making a Hettsui-sama.

The second or anthropomorphic stage of the development of the idea of God arises out of the rhetorical necessity of rendering more vivid, even at the expense of exact truth, the presentation of the conception of the powers of nature as living things. Finding that the bare assertion that they are alive produces little impression, the poet or seer goes a step further; and boldly ascribes to them human form, passions, actions, and character. Myth and metaphor are his instruments. The God has bodily parts, parents, sex, and children. He eats, drinks, is angry or alarmed, loves, fights, weaves, cultivates the ground, fishes, hunts, and dies. With the advance of social organization he is a chief or a king. Sometimes in these metaphors we can trace a special application to the deity's natural functions. Sometimes they are introduced merely for general effect. The results of this process for good and for evil are written large in the pages of human history. It is, on the one hand, the indispensable means by which the high intuitions of the seer are brought home, more or less imperfectly, to the multitude. On the other hand, the true original nature divinity is often lost sight of in a profusion of anthropomorphic fancies, and nothing is left but a magnified man, whose ultimate fate it is to be disavowed by advancing knowledge and enlightenment.

It has been said that the primitive man knows no distinction between fancy and reality. In truth, life would be impossible for such a simpleton. However primitive he may be, he cannot hold a fire in his hand by thinking of the frosty Caucasus. The difference between a real dinner and an imaginary one is palpable even to his limited intelligence. The hunter who could not distinguish between the game of his imagination and the reality could never earn a living. He would be fit only for an imbecile asylum. The child is well aware that his mud pies are not fit to eat. The savage woman who pretends to herself that a stone is her lost baby, knows in her heart that this is nothing more than make-believe. Even a dog appreciates the distinction between a real rat and the object which it pleases him to fancy one, and worries accordingly. The seer is conscious that his anthropomorphic language is only metaphorical. Dante felt this when he said:—

Per questo la Scrittura condescende
A nostra facultate e piedi e mano
Attribuisce a Dio ed altro intende.

Metaphor is of the very essence of myth. But the literal-minded vulgar are at all times prone to confound the altro which is clothed in myth and metaphor with its outward husk, and the literal-minded scholar or scientific man is often little better. Hirata says that "what we call kami are all men. Even among men those who are excellent are called kami. The natural difference between men and Gods is that the Gods are high and men are low, owing to the greater care taken by the creator deities in producing the former." He thinks that the Shinto deities are about ten feet high.

The humanization of the nature deities is reflected in the vocabulary of Shinto. The term mioya, or "august parent," is frequently used of them. Tsuchi or tsutsu, old forms of chichi, father, occurs in the names of several. It is primarily by no means physical fatherhood which is meant in such cases, although there are no doubt vulgar minds who are unable to rise above this conception and have thereby done much to corrupt religion.

In Western religions a God must be either male or female. The grammatical structure of their languages compels Europeans to say either he or she in speaking of deities. In Japan this necessity does not exist. The forms of Japanese speech take little account of sex. Many Shinto deities have no sex at all. In others sex is indicated by the incidents of the myth or by the additions of such terminations as wo male, me female. There are several pairs of married deities. In art, sex is comparatively little distinguished in Japan.

The reason for attributing one sex to a deity rather than the other is not always evident. Provinces and mountains are sometimes male and sometimes female. The Food Goddess is naturally feminine, as representing the productive principle of nature, and perhaps also because cooking is the business of women. The male sex is more suitable to Susa no wo's violent character as the Rain-storm. Warlike gods like Hachiman are naturally masculine.

The "chieftain" conception of divinity is represented by the use of the word wo, male, i.e., virile or valiant one, in many of the names of deities, and by the ascription to some of warlike qualities. There is nothing to show that these are deified chieftains. On the contrary, the term wo is applied, like tsuchi, father, to what are unmistakably nature deities, such as the Sea-Gods Soko-tsutsu-wo (bottom-father-male) Naka-tsutsu-wo (middle-father-male), and Uwa-tsutsu-wo (upper-father-male), produced by the lustrations of Izanagi in the sea after his return from Yomi.

Tohe, another word for chieftain, occurs in the name of the Wind-God, Shina tsu tohe.

Nushi, master, is found in the names of several deities.

The application to the Shinto deities of words implying sovereignty is illustrated by sube or sume, which enters into a number of compounds relating to the Gods or Mikados. This word means "to collect together into one," and hence "to hold general rule over." Sumera or sumeragi no mikoto is the Mikado. Several deities enjoy the honorary epithet of Sume-gami, or Subera-gami.

Mi-koto, august thing, is also applied equally to Gods and Mikados, and in ancient times even to parents. It is nearly equivalent to our "majesty."

Wake, a branch, that is to say, a branch of the imperial family, a prince, is applied to deities.

Hiko and hime occur frequently in the names of gods. These words mean literally sun-child and sun-female, but in practice they are equivalent to prince and princess, or lord and lady. In the history of these words one may observe the operation of both of the great currents of deity-forming thought. Hi, sun, is used as an epithet for the glorification of human personages, and the compounds hiko and hime are in turn applied to nature powers as a personifying term. The Wind-God is a hiko.

The rhetorical impulse to realize in its various phases the human character of the nature deities of Shinto has produced a number of subsidiary personages, who are attached to them as wives, children, ministers, or attendants. Some of these are also nature deities. In others we find a union of the two deity-making tendencies. Thus Koyane, by the circumstance of his descent from Musubi, the God of Growth, and by his position of high-priest to the Sun-Goddess, belongs to the category of nature deities, while as an embodiment of the collective humanity of the Nakatomi sacerdotal corporation, whose ancestor he is feigned to be, he belongs to the class of deified human beings.

In Japan, the myth and metaphor-making faculty—in other words the imagination—though prolific enough, is comparatively feeble. The ancient Japanese especially were appreciably more neglectful than Western races of the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and there was therefore less scope for the play of fancy in which religious personification consists. Like other Far-Eastern peoples, they realized the personal conception of deity with less intensity than the Aryan or Semitic nations. In this respect Homer and the Bible stand at the opposite pole from Confucius, whose Tien has as little about it of humanity as is possible for a being who is said to know, to command, to reward, and to punish. Shinto approaches Confucianism in this respect. There is, no doubt, a profuse creation of personified nature-deities, but we find on examination that they are shadowy personages with ill-defined functions and characters wanting in consistency. Moreover, owing to the neglect by the Japanese of grammatical forms indicating number, it is frequently hard to tell whether a given name is that of one deity or of several. Musubi, the God of Growth, is sometimes one God, sometimes two, while at a later period he became split up into five or more deities. The Wind-God is at one time a single deity, at another a married couple. Susa no wo has in recent times been made into a trinity. Such fissiparous reproduction of deities is characteristic of a low degree of organization.^[7] To meet the difficulties arising from this state of things Motoöri, in the eighteenth century, propounded his theory of bun-shin, or "fractional bodies," which may remind us of the "three persons and one substance" of Christian theology. Hirata, his pupil, speaking of the three Sea-deities, Uha tsutsu no wo, Naka tsutsu no wo, and Soko tsutsu no wo, says: "This deity, although, strictly speaking, born as three deities, is described as though one deity were present. This is to be understood of the God dividing his person and again uniting it. The descent of the Adzumi no Muraji (a noble family) from him shows that in this respect he is to be regarded as one."

The circumstance that many of the Gods, like the Japanese themselves, have numerous aliases, adds to the uncertainty. The nomina and the numina do not invariably go together. There is sometimes reason to suspect that it is the same God who appears under different names, while, on the other hand, the same name may cover what are in reality two or more different deities.

There were no arts of sculpture or painting in Japan before their introduction from China in historical times, and the consequent want of images and pictures for which Shinto has been commended must have contributed materially to prevent the Gods from acquiring distinct personalities like those of ancient Greece.

The feeble grasp of personality indicated by the above facts is profoundly characteristic of the Japanese genius. It is illustrated by their unimaginative literature, which makes but sparing use of personification, allegory, and metaphor, by their drama, with its late and imperfect development, and by their art, which has produced little monumental sculpture or portrait painting of importance. It may also be traced in the grammar, which has practically no gender, thus showing that the Japanese mind is comparatively careless of marking the distinction between animate and inanimate and male and female. The law takes far less cognizance of the individual and more of the family than with us. Another fact of the same order is the neglect of distinctions of person shown by the sparing use of personal and other pronouns. In a passage translated from Japanese into English, without any intention of illustrating this fact, there occur only six pronouns in the former against nearly one hundred in the latter. The verb has no person. Yuku for example, means equally I go, thou goest, he goes, we go, you go, and they go. It is true that person may be indicated by the use of honorifics to mark the second person and humble forms for the first, but even when these are taken into account, the absence from Japanese of indications of person is very remarkable.

Herbert Spencer, in his ‘Principles of Sociology,’ suggests that the comparative fewness of personal pronouns in the languages of the Far East is owing to the circumstance that they “establish with the individual addressed a relation too immediate to be allowed where distance is to be maintained.” Now, not only is it possible, and even common, for pronouns to be used for the express purpose of magnifying the distance between the speaker and the person whom he addresses, as in the case of the German er when used as a pronoun of the second person, but Spencer's explanation does not meet the case of pronouns of the third person, which are just as rare in these languages as those of the first and second. Nor is there anything in the relations between men of high and low degree in these countries which is so radically different from those which have prevailed in Europe as to produce such a far-reaching difference in the language of all classes of society. The truth is that these nations do not avoid pronouns. Their minds are still in a stage of development in which they have not yet realized the advantages in clearness of expression which are to be gained by a more systematic distribution of their ideas into the three categories of first, second, and third person. It is with them not a matter of etiquette, but of poverty of imagination, that power which, as Mr. P. Lowell has remarked, is to the mental development what spontaneous variation is to organic development.^[8]

In Stages I. and II. of the evolution of nature-deities, it is the nature power or object itself which is the deity. Stage II. (Anthropomorphism), so long as it is not meant literally, is not inconsistent with a direct worship of natural objects and phenomena. But the vulgar are always prone to mistake metaphor for reality. When they are told that the Sun is a goddess, who walks, weaves, wears armour, sows rice, and so on, they take these statements literally, combining an implicit belief in them with the worship of the Sun itself. Even Motoöri says that it is the actual Sun in Heaven which we worship as Amaterasu no Oho-Kami (the Heaven-shining-great Deity), while he believes at the same time that the Sun-myth of the Kojiki is real history. A time comes when it is objected that the Sun has no arms or legs necessary for the performance of the actions attributed to her. It is pointed out that the wind has no bodily form at all. Instead of going back to the true explanation—that these things are only metaphorical, the literal-minded man prefers to accept the suggestion (which brings us to Stage III.) that the deity is not the actual sun, or wind, or sea, or mountain, but a powerful being who rules it. Such beings, however, are not at first conceived of as in any way incorporeal. There is considerable confusion observable in Shinto between Stages I. and II. and Stage III. We have seen that Motoöri identified Ama-terasu with the Sun. His pupil Hirata, on the other hand, says that the Sun-Goddess was born on earth, and was sent up to Heaven as "Ruler of the Sun." And while it is true that a sea may be directly called Kami, we have also a Sea-God, Toyotama-hiko, who is as clearly distinguished from the physical ocean as Neptune is. This fluctuation is common to all mythologies. Greek literature is full of examples of reverence paid at one time to natural objects and phenomena, and at another to deities which rule them. They adored Apollo as well as Helios. Muir, in the introduction to vol. v. of his 'Sanskrit Texts,' says:—"The same visible object was at different times regarded diversely as being either a portion of the inanimate universe, or an animated being and a cosmical power. Thus in the Vedic hymns, the sun, the sky, and the earth are severally considered, sometimes as natural objects governed by particular gods, and sometimes as themselves gods who generate and control other beings." Our own poets are not a whit disturbed by such inconsistencies. In 'Paradise Lost' the Sun is apostrophized in one place as the "God of this new world," while in another passage of the same poem we have a "Uriel, Regent of the Sun." Shakespeare, in the 'Tempest,' puts into the mouth of an anthropomorphic Iris the words:—

The Queen of the Sky,
Whose watery arch and messenger am I.

Spiritism.—We now come to Stage IV., or spiritism. The great and obvious difficulties connected with the anthropomorphic conception of deity, even in the modified form of a belief in corporeal beings detached from natural phenomena, led to spiritism, which may be defined as a partial or complete negation of the material properties of the Gods. Spiritism is therefore far from being a "primitive " religious development, as is so often supposed. "Primitive man," it has been said, "thinks that the world is pervaded by spiritual forces." I would rather describe his mental attitude as a piecemeal conception of the universe as alive, just as he looks on his fellow man as alive without analyzing him into the two distinct entities of body and soul. A dog knows quite well the difference between alive and dead; but the distinction between body and soul is far beyond his intellectual capacity.

In Japan the process of spiritualizing the Gods has not gone very far. Like the Gods of the Homeric Olympus,^[9] the Shinto deities are, on the whole, unspiritual beings.

The doctrine of spiritism is associated in Shinto with the word Mitama, for which "spirit" is the nearest English equivalent. Strictly speaking, the Mitama is not the God, but an emanation or effluence from him, which inhabits his temple, and is the vehicle of his action at a distance from the place where he himself resides. It therefore corresponds to the Shekinah (that which dwells) of the Jews, and, though in a less marked degree, to the Roman numen. The Shekinah, like the Mitama, is a later development. Where Habakkuk, ii. 20, says, "The Lord is in his holy temple," the Targums have, "Jehovah was pleased to cause his Shekinah to dwell in his holy temple." I cannot see that the Shekinah and Mitama owe anything to the analogous doctrine of the separability of the human soul and body. The ghost is not the parent of either.^[10]

The unavoidable assumption that an anthropomorphic God can act at a distance from his own abode in Heaven or elsewhere really involves the doctrine of spiritism, though time and thought are required for its development. It is clearly not the Sun-Goddess herself who lives in Ise. Her true place is in Heaven; but she is present in some way on earth, as is proved by her answering the prayers which are addressed to her at her shrine. The explanation which is ultimately forthcoming is that it is the Mitama, or spirit, of the Goddess which resides there. We have here a foreshadowing of the doctrine of the omnipresence of deity.

The etymology of the word Mitama will repay examination. Mi is simply a honorific prefix. Tama contains the root of the verb tabu, to give, more often met with in its lengthened form tamafu. Tama retains its original signification in tama-mono, a gift thing, and toshi-dama, a new year's present. Tama next means something valuable, as a jewel. Then, as jewels are mostly globular in shape, it has come to mean anything round. At the same time, owing to its precious quality, it is used symbolically for the sacred emanation from the God which dwells in his shrine, and also for that most precious thing, the human life or soul.^[11]

The meaning of tama is illustrated by the following story, which is related in the Nihongi of Ohonamochi, the Creator or Kosmos-deity of Idzumo myth:—

"Coming at last to the province of Idzumo, he spake and said: 'This Central Land of Reed-plains had been always waste and wild. The very rocks, trees, and herbs were all given to violence. But I have now reduced them to submission, and there is none that is not compliant.' Therefore he said finally: 'It is I, and I alone, who now govern this land. Is there perchance any one who could join with me in governing the world?' Upon this a divine radiance^[12] illuminated the sea, and of a sudden there was something which

floated towards him and said: 'Were I not here, how couldst thou subdue this land? It is because of my presence that thou hast been able to accomplish this mighty task.' 'Who art thou?' asked Ohonamochi. It replied and said: 'I am thy spirit (tama) of good luck, the wondrous spirit.' Then said Ohonamochi: 'True; I know, therefore, that thou art my spirit (tama) of good luck, the wondrous spirit. Where dost thou now wish to dwell?' The spirit answered and said: 'I wish to dwell on Mount Mimoro, in the province of Yamato.' Accordingly he built a shrine in that place and made the spirit to go and dwell there. This is the God of Oho-miwa."

The distinction between the God and his spiritual double so clearly indicated in this extract is often neglected and the deity of Miwa spoken of simply as Ohonamochi. The same uncertainty as to the spiritual character of the God is reflected in his names Oho-kuni-nushi (great-country-master) and Oho-kuni-dama (great-country-spirit), and in a legend told of him in the Kojiki, where he is corporeal enough to have a child by a mortal woman and yet sufficiently spiritual to pass through a keyhole.

In the Idzumo Fudoki, Susa no wo speaks of the village of Susa as the place where his mitama was settled, that is to say, where a shrine was dedicated to him. The Nihongi states that Izanami's mitama was worshipped at Kumano with music and offerings of flowers. In a modern book the Hi no mitama (spirit of the Sun) is not the Sun-Goddess, but a separate deity of a lower class.

The element tama enters into the names of several deities. The Food-Goddess is called either Ukemochi no Kami or Uka no mitama.^[13] But the meaning "spirit" is not applicable in every case in which a God's name contains this element. Futo-dama, for example, the name of the supposed ancestor of the Imbe priestly corporation, probably means "great gift or offering." Yorodzu-dama no Kami is not the God of ten thousand spirits, but the God of ten thousand offerings.

It is a curious circumstance that in later times the mitama par excellence were the phallic Sahe no Kami. Their festival was formerly called the mitama matsuri. It is now known by the Chinese equivalent Goriōye.

In a few cases the mitama is in duplicate, a nigi-mitama, or gentle spirit, and an ara-mitama, or rough spirit.^[14] In the Idzumo Fudoki a man who is praying for revenge calls upon the nigi-tama of the Oho-kami (great deity) to remain quiet, and asks the ara-tama to attend to his petition. The legendary Empress Jingo was attended on her expedition to Korea by two such sea-god mitama, one to guard her person, the other to lead the van of her army. But we hear little of this distinction in the older records. The aragami-matsuri (rough-God-festival) of later days was a sort of saturnalia when license was permitted to servants.

The Kojiki and Nihongi do not theorize about the mitama. Hirata's statement that they do not distinguish between the utsushi-mi-mi (real-august-body)^[15] and the mitama of the Gods is, as the case of Ohonamochi shows, not quite correct. But there is much foundation for it. In one myth, for example, the Sun-Goddess in handing over the divine mirror to Ninigi, enjoins on him to regard it as her mitama, and in another version of the story to look upon it as herself.

Another indication of an advance towards spirituality in the older Shinto literature is the distinction which is made between araha-goto (public things) and kakure-goto (hidden things), the former term being applied to temporal and the latter to spiritual matters, namely, the service of the unseen Gods. Mystery is not the vital element of religion. It depends on what we know, not on what we do not know. Still, there perhaps never was a religion which did not betray some feeling that what we know is only an infinitesimal portion of that infinite sum of knowledge for which mankind is possessed with an eternal yearning. Religion, though not based in mystery, must always proceed, like other knowledge, from the known towards the unknown. A good deal, however, that is mysterious in religion is of our own making. Hirata, when he can find no way out of the difficulties arising from his crude, literal-minded anthropomorphism, constantly resorts to the time-honoured expedient of declaring his problems mysteries which transcend human intelligence, exclaiming, "Oh! how wonderful! Oh! how strange! Oh! how strange! Oh! how wonderful!"

Motoöri and Hirata account for the invisibility of such Gods as Musubi, the God of Growth, by the theory that since the Age of the Gods they have removed further from the earth, so that they are now beyond the scope of human vision. In other respects, however, they have, under unacknowledged Chinese influence, greatly developed the hints of the spiritual nature of the Gods which are found in the Kojiki and Nihongi. Of the mitama, Motoöri says^[16]:—

"In general, when such or such a God is mentioned in the old scriptures, we must distinguish between the real God and his mitama. The real God is his actual body ; the mitama is his divine spirit: the mitama-shiro (spirit-token) is the thing, be it a mirror or aught else, to which the divine spirit attaches itself. It is commonly called the Shintai (God-body). Now both the real body and the spirit are spoken of simply as the God. Thus when we are told that Amaterasu no Ohokami was entrusted to Toyo-suki-iri-bime and Yamato no Oho-kuni-dama to Nunaki-iri-bime, it is not to be supposed that the real bodies of these two deities were in the Imperial Palace. It is unquestionably their mitama-shiro which are spoken of as if they were the real bodies...... Again, when we are told in the history of the same reign that the Mikado assembled the eighty myriads of Gods on the plain of Kami-asachi and inquired of them by divination, this is not like the assembly in the divine age of the real Gods in the Plain of High Heaven. The invitation is to their mitama."

The same writer says that of the attendant deities who came down from Heaven with Ninigi, some came in their real bodies, some as mitama. Among the former he naturally classes all those who are represented as having human descendants. Hirata regards this as a discovery which will endure to all ages.

The following quotation from Hirata's Koshiden (vi. 9) illustrates further the ideas of this school of theology regarding the spiritual nature of the Gods:—

"Both this God (Chigaheshi) and Kunado^[17] were produced by the great mitama of the great God Izanagi applying itself earnestly to preventing the entrance into this world of the things coming furiously from the Land of Yomi, and which accordingly became separated from him and adhered to a staff and a stone. Remaining there, it (the mitama) did good service in both cases. These Gods, moreover, sometimes reveal their real bodies and dispense blessings. This may not be doubted. We find below that Kunado no Kami acted as a guide to Futsunushi, and that Chigaheshi no Oho-Kami was two deities distinguished as hiko and hime (prince and princess)."

Hirata thinks that Gods (and men too) have two doubles, the nigi-tama and an aratama mentioned above. These he distinguishes from the Zentai no mitama, or "spirit of the entire body." But he admits that these distinctions are not recognized in the old Shinto. There is no limit to the subdivision of the mitama. Hirata explains that the deity is like a fire, which may be communicated to a lamp or to firewood while the original fire remains the same. "But the world knows not this." In other words, this is a philosophic refinement too subtle for the popular taste.

While the old records rarely distinguish between the God's real body and his mitama, in later times the mitama is often confounded with the mitama-shiro (spirit-token), or shintai (god-body) as the concrete representative of the God is called. Even in the Nihongi there is a case in which a sword is called Futsu no mitama. The Kiujiki calls the mirror of the Sun-Goddess her mitama. The Shinto Miōmoku (1699) says that Futsu no mitama is the sword of the great deity of Kashima, and speaks of the Toyo-uka no mitama (the Food-spirit) as being, or residing in, a stone. Hirata himself calls a stone idol the mitama of the God, and speaks of the Sun-Goddess's mitama as going backward and forward between Ise and the sky. The unspiritual vulgar naturally find it hard to distinguish between the spirit of the God and its concrete representative.

The doctrine of the separability of the human body and soul, and of the continued existence of the latter after death, whether in a material or semi-material form, or as a pure spirit, may have been a factor in the spiritualizing of the cruder anthropomorphic conceptions of deity. But there is little or no evidence to this effect in the old Shinto scriptures, and the above pages show that other important influences were at work in producing this result. Whether the idea of God had its origin in the doctrine of separable human souls is a question which may be left to the discerning reader's judgment.

Gods of Classes and Qualities.—No language is possible without some exercise of the powers of generalization and abstraction. In Japanese, however, we miss many of the more general, and especially of the more abstract, conceptions embodied in European languages, a circumstance which limits the scope of the personifying faculty, none too vigorous in itself. Supposing that we take the series of conceptions beginning with the concrete individual tree, and passing through evergreen oak, oak, tree, and vegetable, to the definitive generalization of the universe. The Japanese language has no word for vegetable except sōmoku, a recent compound of Chinese origin. The word for universe is Ame-tsuchi (Heaven + earth) which is almost certainly a translation of the Chinese ten-chi. The consequence is that neither the class of vegetables nor the universe is recognized in the Japanese scheme of nature-deities. Individual trees are deified, and there is a God of trees, but that is all. The neglect of grammatical number in the Japanese language often obscures the distinction between the Gods of individual objects and of classes. Ki no Kami means equally the God of the tree and the God of trees.^[18]

There is a marked poverty of abstract terms in the Japanese language, and the personification of abstract qualities is correspondingly restricted. There is scarcely anything in Shinto to compare with the numerous personified abstractions of Greek and Roman mythology. Izanagi and Izanami, embodiments of the creative or generative powers of nature, are probably not originally Japanese, but an echo of the Yin and Yang of Chinese philosophy. I have a suspicion that Musubi, the God of Growth, may yet be traced to a Chinese source.

 

1. At the festival of Nifu Miōjin in Kiī, when the procession bearing offerings arrives before the shrine, the village chief calls out in a loud voice, "According to our annual custom, let us all laugh." To which a hearty response is given. This is because this God does not go to Idzumo for an annual visit like the others.
2. 'Sociology,' p. 153.
3. Compare with this the following description of the huacas of the ancient Peruvians. "All those things which from their beauty and excellence are superior to other things of a like kind; things that are ugly and monstrous or that cause horror and fright; things out of the usual course of nature."
4. In the spirit of Wordsworth's

   "Listen, the mighty being is awake
   And doth with his eternal motion make
   A noise like thunder everlastingly."

5. M. Goblet d'Alviella says: "I maintain that neither of these two forms of worship necessarily presupposes the other; but that man having been led by different roads to personify the souls of the dead on the one hand and natural objects and phenomena on the other, subsequently attributed to both alike the character of mysterious superhuman beings. Let us add that this must have taken place everywhere, for there is not a people on earth in which we do not come upon these forms of belief side by side and intermingled." Dr. Pfleiderer's view is substantially identical.
6. 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.
7. It was not unknown in ancient Greece and Rome. Zeus, Hercules, and other deities became divided up in this way.
8. "Mr. Tylor has justly observed that the true lesson of the new science of Comparative Mythology is the barrenness in primitive times of the faculty which we most associate with mental fertility, the imagination...... Among these multitudes (the millions of men who fill what we vaguely call the East) Literature, Religion, and Art—or what correspond to them—move always within a distinctly drawn circle of unchanging notions...... This condition of thought is rather the infancy of the human mind prolonged than a different maturity from that most familiar to us."—Maine, 'Early History of Institutions,' pp. 225-6. This characteristic of the mental development of the races of the Far East is discussed in 'A Comparative Study of the Japanese and Korean Languages,' by W. G. Aston, in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, August, 1879, and more fully by Mr. Percival Lowell, in his 'Soul of the Far East,' 1888. See also Mr. B. H. Chamberlain's 'Kojiki,' Introd., lxvi.
9. Homer implicitly denies the spirituality of his Gods when he says that the Hercules which was summoned up by Ulysses was only his eidolon, or phantom, the real man being in Olympus among the happy Gods.
10. See an instructive article on 'Shekinah' in Dr. Hastings's 'Dictionary of the Bible.'
11. "And mine eternal jewel given to the common enemy of man."—'Macbeth,' Act III. scene i.
12. The Shekinah was also associated with a divine radiance, or glory.
13. Mi mi (august body) in the names of others involves a more material conception of deity.
14. Corresponding to the mo acha, uncle of peace, and shi acha, rough uncle, of the Ainus.
15. Homer's αὐτός.
16. Sakitake no Ben, 21.
17. See Index.
18. For deities of classes consult Dr. Tylor's 'Primitive Culture,' ii. 242.