Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/70

 balls of rice were tied to a straw rope a hundred palms long, and were carried at midnight on a hundred consecutive nights to the shrine of Inari, a palm's length of the rope being deposited at the shrine on each occasion, the rice would ultimately be eaten by a fox which thenceforth became the servant of the worshipper, provided that his heart was free from carnal lust. The professional fox-tamer undertook to produce the same result without these troublesome preliminaries, and one could thus enrich oneself and bring fever or madness on an enemy. On the other hand, if a man possessed this power, it was believed that the fact showed itself by miraculous and voluntary materialisation of his thoughts, so that if he happened to think of a snake as he watched a friend eating a meal, the reptile would immediately appear among the friend's viands, or if a sorrowful mood visited him as he reflected on another's conduct, the subject of his reflections would at once be moved to tears. The fox-tamer, dog-trainer, or snake-charmer being thus unable to fully control his wayward servant, ordinary men shunned him carefully; a fact which doubtless helped to determine the degraded position assigned to him by official classifiers.

The fact that while the keeper of a brothel was placed among the polluted, no such stigma attached to the inmates of the brothel, must be attributed to the theory that the adoption of a life of shame could never be a matter of free volition,