Shinto. Aston William George
and Nihongi thought that children could be produced by crunching jewels in the mouth and spitting them out.
There is, however, an exception to the rule that a storyteller does not believe in the truth of his own inventions. It is notoriously possible for the author of a fictitious narrative to become, after a time, unable to distinguish it from a statement of actual facts. There is a case on record in which a learned judge communicated to the Psychical Society in perfect good faith a ghost story, all the principal features of which were proved to be imaginary. They had their origin in his own talent as a distinguished raconteur. But this is a morbid phenomenon which must not be confounded with the normal action of the imagination in the child, the savage, or the primitive (or, indeed, any other) myth-maker.
The inability to distinguish between imagination and fact is really not a special characteristic of the primitive man or savage, but of the literal-minded of all ages, in presence of the creations of imaginative genius. Some few primitive men may distinguish between the spiritual kernel and its imaginative envelopment. But for the multitude this is impossible. Unable to discriminate between these two elements, and dimly conscious that the whole is a valuable possession, they wisely accept it indiscriminately as actual fact.
De Gubernatis, in his 'Zoological Mythology,' relates a story which illustrates the respective attitudes of the myth-maker and his hearers. He tells us that "when he was four years old, as he was walking one day with a brother, the latter pointed to a fantastical cloud on the horizon, and cried, 'Look down there: that is a hungry wolf running after the sheep.' He convinced me so entirely of that cloud being really a hungry wolf that I instantly took to my heels and escaped precipitately into the house." Take, again, the following sun-myth, fresh coined from the mint of Mr. George Meredith: -
"The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green and the pine stems redder gold: leaving brightest footprints upon thickly weeded banks, where the foxglove's last upper bells incline and bramble shoots wander amid moist herbage," &c.
This myth, like the old Greek tales of Prometheus and Tantalus, which Wordsworth calls
Fictions in form, but in their substance truths,
has a spiritual significance of which Mr. Meredith cannot have been unconscious. Though nobody at the present day supposes that the author or his readers take it for a narrative of actual events, cannot we fancy Macaulay's New Zealander, being told as a fact some traditional, time-worn, corrupt, and ill-interpreted version of it, and, especially if he is a literal-minded philosopher, wondering how it was possible for the English to believe in such a concatenation of anthropomorphic fancies?
The literal acceptation of myth or metaphor is not confined to the lower class of intellect. It was a "teacher of Israel" who could not see how "a man could enter into his mother's womb and be born again." Motoöri and Hirata, highly educated scholars, well versed in Chinese and Indian religious literature, received the stories of the Kojiki and Nihongi as genuine history.
Even Dante and Milton, men of profound spiritual insight, probably accepted in their most literal sense some of the imaginative figments of their predecessors.
There have always been literal-minded unbelievers, who reject the myth and its religious contents without discrimination, and simply value it, if at all, for its aesthetic merits. Of them, as of the literal-minded believer, "Si exempla requiris, circumspice."
The history of the religious myth may be summarized as follows: A, a man of genius, creates it, clearly distinguishing in his own mind between the kernel of religious truth and its imaginative embodiment. His disciples B and C understand him thoroughly. In this stage a myth is called a parable or allegory. Many myths proceed no further. D, F, H, * * * T and V, unable to discriminate the true element from the false, accept the whole confusedly as actual fact. E, G, * * S and U are dense to its religious significance, and think it idle nonsense, or at best, simply a good story. W and X have a glimmering notion that the imaginative part cannot be literally true, but do not dare to question it, lest they should sacrifice at the same time the valuable religious kernel. Z is a philosophic inquirer who, not without difficulty, regains the standpoint of B and C. But by this time the myth has been superseded as a vehicle of religious truth by fuller and more exact forms of expression.
The chief ideas underlying Japanese myth are, firstly, the conception-piecemeal it is true, and inadequate-of the so-called inanimate universe as being really instinct with sentient life, and exercising a loving providential care over mankind;50 and secondly, the doctrine that honour and obedience are due to the sovereign whose beneficent rule secures to the people blessings comparable to that of the sun's light and warmth. For such, I take it, is the real meaning of the story by which the Mikados are feigned to be descendants of the Sun-Goddess. It is the Japanese version of the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Without these and similar vital elements Japanese myth would be nothing more than what some writers have supposed it, a farrago of absurdities, and its examination would belong not to the physiology, but to the pathology of the human mind.
It can hardly be maintained, however, that the poets and seers of ancient Japan achieved much success in clothing their spiritual conceptions in mythical form. There is little force or beauty in their stories, and there is a plentiful admixture of matter which, to us at least, is frivolous, revolting, or devoid of religious significance.
There is no summer and winter myth in the old Japanese books, no deluge myth, and no eclipse myth. There is, strange to say, no earthquake myth, and but one solitary mention of a God of Earthquakes. There are no astral myths, no "Returning Saviour" myth, and no "Journey of the Dead" beyond the bare mention of an "Even Pass of Yomi," or Hades. The creation of mankind is not accounted for.
Myth and Ritual. – When a myth and a ceremony relate to the same subject-matter, which comes first in order of time? Is the ceremony a dramatic commemoration of the events related in the myth, or, vice versâ, is the myth an attempt to explain the origin of the ceremony? Some go so far as to say that ritual is the source of all religious myth. The late Mr. D. G. Brinton, on the other hand, held that "every rite is originally based on a myth." Robertson Smith's view was that "in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth." No general rule can be laid down in these cases. Every such question must be decided according to the available evidence. A myth is a narrative, and a ceremony a kind of dramatic peformance. It will not be disputed that dramas have been founded on narratives, and that narratives are sometimes taken from dramas, as in the case of Lamb's 'Tales from Shakespeare.' Novels are every day dramatized, and the reverse process, though not common with ourselves, is familiar in Japan. Several of the Shinto deities are worshipped for no other reason than because they are mentioned in the myths of the Kojiki and Nihongi. It was probably the mythical account of the friendship of Ajisuki and Ame-waka-hiko which led to shrines being erected to these deities side by side at Idzumo. A literal interpretation of the obviously allegorical story of Iha-naga-hime and Kono-saku-hime led, in later times, to an actual cult of these personages. On the other hand, the ceremony of religious ablution is certainly older than the myth which represents Izanagi as washing in the sea in order to remove the pollutions of the land of Yomi. The worship of the Sun is assuredly not the outcome, but the source, of the Japanese solar myths, though it may owe to them some of its more modern features.
Many myths have no ceremonial associated with them, and there is much ceremony for which the myth-makers have not attempted to account.
CHAPTER VI.
THE MYTHICAL NARRATIVE
No really adequate idea of the old Japanese myths can be gained without a direct study of the Kojiki, Nihongi, and Kiujiki, with all their repetitions, inconsistencies, and obscurities. In the following outline, taken mainly from the two first-named works, a selection has been made of such incidents as have an interest and significance for European students of mythology.
Both the Nihongi and the Kiujiki begin with a passage which is justly repudiated by the modern school of Shinto theologians as in reality belonging to the materialistic
See Dr. Tylor's 'Primitive Culture,' second edition, i. 285.