Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/185

Rh weird of the Ryōbu rites, are reduced to such very low terms as hardly to appear. Of purification prayers only those of pure Shintō origin are recited. Those of Ryōbu fabrication, such as the rokkon shōjō no harai, being carefully ignored.

On the other hand, the impersonal part of the service is elaborate. It has all the formality of the usual state function, for it is nothing more nor less than a divine banquet, with the god himself for after-dinner speaker. The dinner is all-essential to the affair, as it is to all Shintō rites. For the Shintō practice of dining its deities is not confined to the ceremony of possession. Wherever the gods are invoked, for any cause whatsoever, they are induced to descend by the prospect of a dinner. A repast stands perpetually prepared on all Shintō altars; shrines being, to put it irreverently, free-lunch counters for deity, while every Shintō service is but a special banquet given some particular god. One comes to conceive of a Shintō god's life as one continuous round of dining out. To induce an after-dinner mood in a god whom one wishes to propitiate is doubtless judicious.