Percival Lowell

“ This man greatly resembled Take-no-uchi-no-sukune. And being troubled in spirit that Take-no-uchi-no-sukune should be put to death without just cause, he said unto him: 'All Japan knoweth thee to be a true man and a faithful one to our Lord the Emperor. Now, therefore, fleeing hence secretly, get thee to our Lord the Emperor and justify thyself before him. And furthermore men say that I greatly resemble thee. So, therefore, in place of thee, will I die, and thus show all men that thy heart is pure before our Lord the Emperor.' Whereupon he slew himself with his sword. ”

“ How infinitely more so when confirmed by visible action on the part of the gods themselves. An introduction to such peculiar privilege is not thoughtlessly to be given to everybody. It will not do to present profane outsiders to one's gods; still less thus to present one's bosom foe. Such an act is nothing short of sacerdotal suicide.
Yet something still more improbable the Buddhists would have us believe. For they admit getting the gohei from Shintō, and at the same time they assert that they taught that faith the possession cult. ”

“ In short, wherever a gohei is hung up you may know it for one of the purification kind.
To the second or the god's body variety belong all such as are stood upright upon a wand. The gohei that makes cynosure upon the temple altar is of this kind and so is the one so daintily domesticated in the family cupboard at home. So also are those met with in the mart, on the mountain-top, and amid the paddy-fields. Last but most important of all these vicarious emblems of deity is that which is clenched in the hands of the possessed during the possession trance. ”

“ The paths that lead so prettily over Japanese hill and valley are set with wayside oratories and before many of them stands a gohei on its stick, sometimes quite humanly housed under a tiny shed, sometimes canopied only by the sky and the stars. ”

“ Such embodiment, indeed, is graciously taking place every day at any Shintō temple. To say that it takes place at the god's pleasure, however, is to put it flatteringly to the god; for it really happens at the will of the worshiper. Every prayer, even the merest momentary mumble, involves incarnation of the gohei by the god, and at a moment's call. For before he begins his prayer the worshiper claps his hands. This is a summons to the god to descend; a like signal bids him depart. At any popular shrine there is thus a continual coming and going on the part of the god ”

“ The Empress Jingō was a good deal of a man. She was a great deal more of a man than her husband, though she was only his second wife. She was simply Empress-consort at first, eventually succeeding her husband, who died from want of faith, as will appear later. Masculine in character, she was most feminine in looks. The Nihonshoki speaks of her as exceedingly pretty and her father's pet, which latter fact proves to my mind that she was a woman of will, for I have observed that fathers are usually proud of daughters of decision. ”

“ Another instance of the gohei incarnated of the god is where it is borne in festival procession sitting upon the sacred horse. This animal, usually an albino, is the god's steed of state, kept for the divine use in the sacred stable, an adjunct to all well-appointed shrines. For in these festivals it is no stick that rides; the god himself sits in the saddle. It is the god's chosen way of appearing in public. In no other way, indeed, does the god ever leave the temple. ”

“ But there are sensible possessions of the gohei; cases where the incarnation of the god may be both seen and felt. It will be remembered that the first sign of the coming on of the possession in the possession trance is the shaking of the gohei-wand. So spontaneous does this shaking seem, that it is no wonder it should be thought so in fact. The gohei shakes, believers say, because the god descends into it, and it quivers yet as passing through it he slips on into the body of the man. ”

“ Here, then, we have accounts of possessions long pre-Buddhist; their very accounts being practically pre-Buddhist themselves. For the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki were written less than one hundred and forty years after Buddhism came to Japan, too short a time for it to have draped old legends with its own detail. Besides, there is not the slightest suspicion that it ever tried to do so. The accounts read as realistically Shintō as one could have them do. What is more, they read, barring a few archaisms, as if recorded of to-day. ”

“ Cases of incarnation where the god may be supposed more nearly to suit his own convenience are those of the gohei of the paddy-fields. These are divine scarecrows, or rather scare-locusts, those pests of the paddy-field farmer. They are scarecrows, however, in an occult sense, for in spite of resembling gods as monstrously as the more secular monstrosities do man, it is not their looks which the locusts do not like, but their disposition. ”

“ For those addicted to such things do not follow them as sciences, but as arts. They have inherited the act embodied in certain actions, and the symbols in which it stands enshrined are to them essentials to its performance. From being so in act, they become so in fact. For so potent is faith, that to believe in a means as essential to an end is, by virtue of that belief alone, to make it so. ”

“ People are not given to detecting flatness of flavor in their own fruit. If the practice be to them so unimportant an affair, why indulge in it at all? Besides, even this lame admission halts at summoning the Shintō gods. ”

“ Now a mystery is not a thing a faith is in the habit of naïvely imparting to the first man it may chance to buttonhole for pious purposes, especially when it is a mystery of the utmost significance to itself. ”

“ Indeed, this domestication of deity, this taming of once wild trances, is not the least peculiar attribute of the far-eastern branch of the subject. Among every people divine trances have taken place, but to make of the accidental and fortuitous the certain and the regular, to develop the casual communion into a systematic cult, shows a degree of familiarity with the subject peculiarly Japanese.
The word kami, which appears both in the ancient and modern expressions, is highly suggestive. For kami refers exclusively to Shintō gods; Buddhist gods being always known as hotoke. ”

“ It is this: the very gods the gohei-wand summons turn in its hands state's evidence against it. For it is the Shintō gods that descend. Not only is it its own gods alone that Shintō summons, but the Buddhists also call Shintō deities, and of their own pantheon only the lower, never the higher, members. To explain this unusual fancy for their neighbors' gods, combined with a relative disregard for the company of their own, the Buddhists allege the, to them, comparative unimportance of the cult. ”

“ For what happens when two persons call at overlapping times upon one and the same god, so that one worshiper bids him be gone while the other would still have him stay, is not strictly clear. But such complications confront the too curious in all theories of anthropomorphic gods, especially when their worshipers are on intimate terms with them. ”

“ In skeleton the modern procedure is all there. In these old Shintō biblical narratives you see the same features that you mark in the Ryōbu-Shintō trances now. The conservatism is quite far-orientally complete, which is another proof, not only that the thing is Shintō, but that the Buddhists brought with them from China nothing akin to it. For we may be sure the gods would not have been behind their people in the great national trick of imitation, and had there been any foreigners to copy they would assuredly have copied them, and not have stayed starchedly Shintō to the present day. ”

“ Of course the gods are the dei ex machina in the matter; and it takes a long time before the universe gets into fairly passable running order, and their presence can generally be dispensed with. This dispensation, indeed, never wholly takes place, and even after the world is going along well enough of itself, and the gods have formally left the field to their descendants, they are continually popping in and out, just to be sure no mistakes are made. One of their favorite methods of appearing on the scene is to possess people. ”

“ It is perhaps not matter for wonder that the Emperor proved skeptical on the subject, and made light of the divine information; upon which he was promptly killed by the gods for contempt of court. After which the Nihonshoki takes up the narrative, and tells us that the Empress, who seems to have been a pious person, was much grieved at the Emperor's sudden taking off for doubting the divine word, and resolved, woman-like, to know about those jewels, a resolve she carried out as follows: "Choosing a lucky day, she went into the purification shrine and became possessed (kannushi to naritamo) . ”

“ The words describing the possessions are all pure Japanese. Many of them are yet comprehensible, being in a way grandfathers to the modern terms. Kami-gakari of which kamu-gakari and kan-gakari are euphonic forms, means godfixed-on. An intransitive verb, it shows the spontaneity of the act. This spontaneity of deity is further dwelt on by tradition. In the good old days the gods descended, it is piously taught, of their own initiative, and not as now because importuned of man. ”

“ But as some good souls will still persist in believing in spooks, in spite of the failure of the not over-incredulous Society for Psychical Research to find a single really trustworthy specimen, it may be well to lay this ghost by a funeral logical rite or two. ”

“ There is at the beginning the usual attempt to make something out of nothing in order to account for the cosmos, much of which is probably Chinese. Then having got primeval chaos into something approaching order, the account gradually assumes consistency, till at last it becomes substantially history, of a far-oriental kind. As it begins with gods and ends with men, the evolution is not of the strictly scientific kind, but rather a general devolution in keeping with the doctrine of original sin. ”

“ They are called the god's body, not because they are permanently god, but because they may become his embodiment at any moment. The little that we know of the evolution of the gohei will help explain what is supposed to take place. ”

“ And then they ask the world to credit the account. One does not know whether to be the more astounded at the colossal coolness which can put forth such a tale, or at the amazing simplicity which can suppose others capable of believing it. ”

“ Anteroom admission to the favor of the gods is surely as valuable a privilege as a like reception at the hands of the great ones of the earth; and we all know what lustre in their own eyes such threshold intimacy casts upon the favored few, even to the extent of pretending to make light of it to others. ”

“ Every well-organized hierarchy has to keep up a certain amount of celestial exclusiveness for purposes of self-preservation. Just because by prolonged devotion it has secured a distant divine recognition is no reason why it should minimize this intimacy to others. ”

“ A result which doubtless satisfactorily accounts for the present almost painful veracity of the Japanese people.
At the dawn of history, then, we find both possession of things and possession of persons already a part of the nation's mythologic heritage. Almost as soon as the gods were they began thus to visit one another. Then so soon as their earthly descendants appeared upon the scene they proceeded to visit them. Deity and humanity have continued on calling terms ever since. ”

“ Passivity is not our passion, preach it as we are prone to do each to his neighbor. Scientifically pessimism is foolishness and impersonality a stage in development from which we are emerging, not one into which we shall ever relapse. ”

“ Apparently she was prone to being possessed, and ended by being quite intimate with deity. Her chronicle is a curious patchwork, pieced out, however, fairly complete between the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki. The Nihonshoki, after some Almanack de Gotha work introducing a few rather dry domesticities, simply kills her husband, without offering us any excuse for the deed except the apparent unimportance of his life. ”