Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/260

238 sacred sakaki (the Cleyera Japonica) in present to the gods. A relative of this its ancestor may still be seen in Korea in the shreds of colored cloth attached there to the devil trees; a shift of devotion which need distress no one, since devils and gods are always first cousins in any faith.

From hemp its material constitution changed successively first to cotton, then to silk, and finally to its present modest paper, a transformation of substance quite in step economically with the progress of the arts. As to its color, the earliest mention of it—in the Kojiki, recorded therefore as early as anything in Japan—tells of two kinds, one dark blue, the other white, used together. Nowadays it is almost always the plain white of ordinary paper. But occasionally gohei of the far-oriental elemental colors, yellow, red, black, white, and blue, may be seen in a row, a cosmic quinquenity of the five elements, wood, fire, earth, water, and metal.

Cloth it was, clothes it has become. For in form it now symbolizes the vesture of the god. Falling in spotless folds that spread out on either side about the wand, it suggests,