Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/396

374 The auto-suggestion is of two parts,—the general idea of change, and its particular performance. The first is like the unintentionally induced hypnotic habits of the Salpétrière. The gods have learned that they are expected to come in Indian file, and kindly do so accordingly. That they did so initially is due undoubtedly to the underlying impersonality of the race.

That there is this general predisposition to rotation in office is proved by the earliness with which the change shows itself. It appears long before the possession is perfect enough for words. The boy whose divine development I instanced before was already several gods in turn, while as yet unable to talk as any. The particular change comes about from associations between the idea of one god and the idea of the other, contracted either in the normal or the entranced state, and then evoked in the course of the entranced's heavenly thinking. Sometimes the link becomes visible. A god will say that he is himself unable to answer a question put to him, and will report the matter to some higher god for solution, after which an attendant of the higher god descends.