Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/208

190 will descend in any one trance, a certain clique of gods usually frequents any one man. What the divine set shall be depends upon what gods the man is intimate with in his normal state. One man's familiar spirits will thus consist of the various Inari, gods of agriculture; another's of defunct and deified gyōja, pious hermits who lived much in the mountains, and are particularly familiar with the peaks; a third's of the higher Shintō divinities. Each is visited by his intimates; his pious proclivities determining with whom he may stand upon calling terms.

Such an impersonal thread of godhead upon which each particular god's personality is strung, running in this manner through the trance, reveals very strikingly the peculiar characteristic of these people—their impersonality. It shows how deep ingrained that impersonality is, that after his sense of self has entirely left the man, the essential quality of that self, its lack of it, still lingers behind. It reminds one in a serious way of the problem of the sand-bank with the hole in it. The sea comes up and washes away the sand-bank; does the hole remain? Here