Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/362

322 form." The oni were therefore invisible but not incorporeal, a description which by no means corresponds to our idea of a ghost. Motoöri denies that the oni are spirits of the dead. In the old literature, he says, this word means simply "devil."

Motoöri could find no proof that the ancient Japanese believed in the immortality of the soul. But that they believed in some sort of continued existence after death can hardly be doubted. It is testified to by the practice of human sacrifices at the tombs of great men, which, as we know from incontestable evidence, prevailed in Japan centuries before the Nihongi and Kojiki were written.

There is something to be said for the contention that the absence of ghosts from the X-record of ancient Japan is not owing to backward development, but to a "later change in the intellectual course, a divergence from, or rejection of, ancestral faiths," brought about by the influence of sceptical Chinese literature, and confined to a cultured class. But surely the weight of evidence forbids this conclusion. It rather tends to show that the ancient Japanese were an unimaginative people, still in the anthropomorphic stage of religious progress and with a radical incapacity for grasping the complex conception which underlies our word "ghost." They had got so far as in some halting measure to separate spirit from body, but they had not yet learnt to conceive of the former as preserving the individuality of the deceased, and as capable of re-assuming a visible form more or less resembling its former mortal integument. The mitama required the assistance of some existing material object in order to become cognisable by our senses.

This view would have to be modified if ghosts were shown to be genuine objective phenomena. It is permissible, however, provisionally, and until psychical research has yielded more accurate and better digested results, to look upon a