Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/233

Rh or reposoir and back again to the shrine. The confusion in many minds between the shintai and the mitama is illustrated by the fact that a standard modern dictionary speaks of the Mikoshi as containing the God's mitama.

Shrines.—A shrine is a species of offering. Whatever may be the case in other countries, in Japan the shrine is not a development of the tomb. They have no resemblance to each other. The tomb is a partly subterranean megalithic vault enclosed in a huge mound of earth, while the shrine is a wooden structure raised on posts some feet above the ground. The Japanese words for shrine indicate that it is intended as a house for the God. Miya, august house, is used equally of a shrine and of a palace, but not of a tomb, except poetically, as when the Manyōshiu speaks of one as a toko no miya, or "long home." Araka, another word for shrine, probably means "dwelling-place." In yashiro, a very common word for shrine, ya means house and shiro representative or equivalent. There is evidence that this word comes to us from a time when the yashiro was a plot of ground consecrated for the occasion to repre- sent a place of abode for the deity. The analogy of the Roman templum will occur to the classical scholar. The himorogi (p. 226), a term which has been the subject of some controversy, was probably, as Hirata suggests, at first an enclosure of sakaki twigs stuck in the ground so as to represent a house. It is probable that in all these cases the make-believe preceded any actual edifice, and was not a substitute for it.

There is a somewhat rare word, namely oki-tsuki, properly a mound, which is applied to both tombs and shrines. Old sepulchral mounds have frequently a small shrine on their summit.

The Shinto shrine is by no means so costly an edifice as its Buddhist counterpart. The hokora, as the smaller