whose mischievous deeds was to flay a piebald colt of Heaven "with a backward flaying" and fling it into the sacred weaving-hall where Amaterasu, the Sun-Goddess, was engaged in weaving the garments of the deities.
For obvious reasons our available evidence respecting black magic is comparatively scanty. Its practitioner does not commit his procedures to paper. But it is well-known in Japan. In the norito by which the Mikado twice a year pronounces to his people the remission of their ritual offences, bewitchment is one of the sins enumerated. There is a proverb which says, "If you practise witchcraft (noroi) against a man, there are two graves." The term inori-korosu (to kill by prayer) is found in dictionaries.
Most Japanese magic is non-religious. But to this rule there are numerous exceptions, as in the cases of black magic just referred to. Amongst other primarily religious magical procedures may be instanced the nailing of a sliver of wood from one of the shrines of Ise over the door as a protection against robbery, and the use of a religious picture or emblem hung in a bag round a child's neck as a safeguard from accident or disease (o mamori). More commonly, however, the religious element is an afterthought introduced in order to give increased potency to a primarily non-religious magical procedure. A good example is described by Dr. Griffis in The Mikado's Empire.[1] Here the operator, a jealous woman, impales an effigy of her victim on a tree. So far we have a sympathetic magic of a familiar type. But the tree is the property of a shrine, and the gods are adjured to impute the desecration to the offending person, and to visit him or her with their deadly vengeance. There is a practice in some parts of Japan for the old women of a village to put barren women through the form of delivering them of a child, represented by a doll. This is ordinary mimetic magic. But some sort of religious sanction is given to it by the date selected for the operation, viz., that of the phallic festival at the first full moon of the year. In other cases a purely non-religious magic is stated to have been practised or taught by gods. Whistling to raise the wind is an example. Jimmu Tennō, the deified legendary founder of the Japanese empire, is said to have first taught the use of magical formulae.
- ↑ Vol. ii., p. 474.
