Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/35

Rh There is considerable confusion observable in Shinto between Stages I. and II. and Stage III. We have seen that Motoöri identified Ama-terasu with the Sun. His pupil Hirata, on the other hand, says that the Sun-Goddess was born on earth, and was sent up to Heaven as "Ruler of the Sun." And while it is true that a sea may be directly called Kami, we have also a Sea-God, Toyotama-hiko, who is as clearly distinguished from the physical ocean as Neptune is. This fluctuation is common to all mythologies. Greek literature is full of examples of reverence paid at one time to natural objects and phenomena, and at another to deities which rule them. They adored Apollo as well as Helios. Muir, in the introduction to vol. v. of his 'Sanskrit Texts,' says:—"The same visible object was at different times regarded diversely as being either a portion of the inanimate universe, or an animated being and a cosmical power. Thus in the Vedic hymns, the sun, the sky, and the earth are severally considered, sometimes as natural objects governed by particular gods, and sometimes as themselves gods who generate and control other beings." Our own poets are not a whit disturbed by such inconsistencies. In 'Paradise Lost' the Sun is apostrophized in one place as the "God of this new world," while in another passage of the same poem we have a "Uriel, Regent of the Sun." Shakespeare, in the 'Tempest,' puts into the mouth of an anthropomorphic Iris the words:—

Spiritism.—We now come to Stage IV., or spiritism. The great and obvious difficulties connected with the anthropomorphic conception of deity, even in the modified form of a belief in corporeal beings detached from natural phenomena, led to spiritism, which may be defined as a partial or complete negation of the material properties of the Gods. Spiritism is therefore far from being a