Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/31

Rh belongs to the category of nature deities, while as an embodiment of the collective humanity of the Nakatomi sacerdotal corporation, whose ancestor he is feigned to be, he belongs to the class of deified human beings.

In Japan, the myth and metaphor-making faculty—in other words the imagination—though prolific enough, is comparatively feeble. The ancient Japanese especially were appreciably more neglectful than Western races of the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, and there was therefore less scope for the play of fancy in which religious personification consists. Like other Far-Eastern peoples, they realized the personal conception of deity with less intensity than the Aryan or Semitic nations. In this respect Homer and the Bible stand at the opposite pole from Confucius, whose Tien has as little about it of humanity as is possible for a being who is said to know, to command, to reward, and to punish. Shinto approaches Confucianism in this respect. There is, no doubt, a profuse creation of personified nature-deities, but we find on examination that they are shadowy personages with ill-defined functions and characters wanting in consistency. Moreover, owing to the neglect by the Japanese of grammatical forms indicating number, it is frequently hard to tell whether a given name is that of one deity or of several. Musubi, the God of Growth, is sometimes one God, sometimes two, while at a later period he became split up into five or more deities. The Wind-God is at one time a single deity, at another a married couple. Susa no wo has in recent times been made into a trinity. Such fissiparous reproduction of deities is characteristic of a low degree of organization. To meet the difficulties arising from this state of things Motoöri, in the eighteenth century, propounded his theory of bun-shin, or "fractional bodies," which may remind us of the "three persons and