Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/44

34 no limit to the subdivision of the mitama. Hirata explains that the deity is like a fire, which may be communicated to a lamp or to firewood while the original fire remains the same. "But the world knows not this." In other words, this is a philosophic refinement too subtle for the popular taste.

While the old records rarely distinguish between the God's real body and his mitama, in later times the mitama is often confounded with the mitama-shiro (spirit-token), or shintai (god-body) as the concrete representative of the God is called. Even in the Nihongi there is a case in which a sword is called Futsu no mitama. The Kiujiki calls the mirror of the Sun-Goddess her mitama. The Shinto Miōmoku (1699) says that Futsu no mitama is the sword of the great deity of Kashima, and speaks of the Toyo-uka no mitama (the Food-spirit) as being, or residing in, a stone. Hirata himself calls a stone idol the mitama of the God, and speaks of the Sun-Goddess's mitama as going backward and forward between Ise and the sky. The unspiritual vulgar naturally find it hard to distinguish between the spirit of the God and its concrete representative.

The doctrine of the separability of the human body and soul, and of the continued existence of the latter after death, whether in a material or semi-material form, or as a pure spirit, may have been a factor in the spiritualizing of the cruder anthropomorphic conceptions of deity. But there is little or no evidence to this effect in the old Shinto scriptures, and the above pages show that other important influences were at work in producing this result. Whether the idea of God had its origin in the doctrine of separable human souls is a question which may be left to the discerning reader's judgment.

Gods of Classes and Qualities.—No language is possible without some exercise of the powers of generalization and abstraction. In Japanese, however, we miss many of the