Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/353

Rh the virtue of spitting and of set forms of speech to bring good or ill luck, and of whistling to raise the wind.

There are several features in this story which betray a recent origin and foreign influences. A comparatively advanced civilisation is indicated by the sword and fish-hooks forged of iron (the Homeric fish-hook was of horn); and the institution of the Hayato as Imperial Guards belongs to a period not very long antecedent to the date of the Nihongi and Kojiki. The palace of the sea-depths and its Dragon-king are of Chinese, and therefore of recent, origin. The comparatively modern character of this important link in the genealogy which traces back the descent of the Mikados to the Sun-Goddess confirms an impression that the ancestor-worship of the ancient Japanese is a later accretion upon what was in its origin a worship of the powers of Nature.

The myths in which Shinto is embodied present special advantages to the student of religion in its earlier forms. They hold an almost unique position, intermediate between the crude conceptions of savages and such mythologies as those of ancient Greece and Rome. They have been recorded at ample length, and in several various and conflicting versions, thus affording scope for a tolerably comprehensive study. They have assumed their present shape comparatively uninfluenced by alien ideas. Something of Chinese philosophy and folklore, and perhaps a few echoes of Indian myth, have intruded to a small extent; but there is happily no room for suspicion of missionary or Christian influence. The Shinto nomenclature is for the most part transparent and reveals the natures and functions of the deities more clearly than is usual in mythology. There is some satisfaction in dealing with divine personages like Ame-terasu no Oho-mi