Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/22

 performed by the sovereign within the precincts of the Palace insured the successful conduct of national business, the same principle prompted the people to invoke, by similar means, heaven's influence in the cause of household prosperity, industrial success, and individual happiness.

History does not indicate the origin of the idea that to carry the gods in triumphal procession was the most fitting form of popular devotion. But history does show that sackcloth and ashes were never credited with any attractions in the eyes of the supernatural powers, and that the Japanese, even in very early ages, judged the brighter aspects of life to be as pleasant to immortals as to mortals. That knowledge of the nation's mood is obtained incidentally and not very agreeably. Annalists tell, not of the glories of the matsuri, but of its abuses. As early as the eighth century, the spring and autumn festivals of the North Star had to be officially interdicted because of immoral licence on the part of the devotees, and a similar prohibition became necessary a hundred years later when the people's methods of asking for blessings had become so extravagant that there stood in every street in Kyōtō a "treasury" (takara-gura) decorated with pictures of the "Seven Gods of Fortune," and a pair of images before which incense was burned and flowers were offered amid circumstances sometimes that should have repelled rather than propitiated the deities. Indeed, any one visiting the great shrines