Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/27

Rh sites, buildings, provinces, trees, all of which are deified and have religious rites in their honour without any very definite personality being attributed to them. They are simply thought of as in some sort of way living things. Mud and sand are dubbed Kami, and there the personification ends. There are a good many colourless deities of this kind in Shinto. Motoöri declares explicitly that when a sea or a mountain is called Kami, it is not the spirit of the sea or mountain which is meant, but the sea or mountain itself. A poet of the Manyoshiu says of Fujiyama:—

When a kitchen wench at the present day speaks of the Hettsui-sama—sama is a honorific and personifying word—she means the cooking-furnace itself regarded as a God, not a spirit inhabiting it. She will even speak of the plasterer making a Hettsui-sama.

The second or anthropomorphic stage of the development of the idea of God arises out of the rhetorical necessity of rendering more vivid, even at the expense of exact truth, the presentation of the conception of the powers of nature as living things. Finding that the bare assertion that they are alive produces little impression, the poet or seer goes a step further; and boldly ascribes to them human form, passions, actions, and character. Myth and metaphor are his instruments. The God has bodily parts, parents, sex, and children. He eats, drinks, is angry or alarmed, loves, fights, weaves, cultivates the ground, fishes, hunts, and dies. With the advance of social organization he is a chief or a king. Sometimes in these metaphors we can trace a special application to the deity's natural functions. Sometimes they are introduced merely for general effect. The results of this process for good and for evil are written large in the pages