Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/122

106 god of agriculture (Inari-sama) for trivialities of the kind.

The character of the company sought is what renders excessive self-mortification necessary. It is only to the very best heavenly society that introductions are so hard to get. Inferior gods permit intimacy on much easier terms. Ordinary ichiko or trance-diviners, for instance, whose deities rank much lower, go through a preparation which is mild in comparison.

II.

The one thing needful to insure divine possession is purity. If you are pure, that is, blank enough, you can easily give habitation to a god. Now some men are born blanker than others, but none are by nature quite blank enough for religious purposes, though secularly they often seem so. Additional vacuity must somehow be acquired, the amount varying not only with the man, but with the rank of the god by whom he desires to be possessed. To reach this state of inanity is the object of the austerities (gyō)

In the days of Ryōbu there were two