Shinto. Aston William George
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 says16: -
"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 Ama-terasu 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 ara-tama 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
Corresponding to the
Homer's άντός
See Index.