were otherwise personally remarkable; and “savage deities” are often mentioned as inhabiting certain portions of Japan, both in the so-called “Divine Age” and during the reigns of the human emperors down to a time corresponding, according to the generally received chronology, with the first or second century of the Christian era. The human emperors themselves, moreover, were sometimes spoken of as deities, and even made personal use of that designation. The gods occasionally transformed themselves into animals, and at other times simple tangible objects were called gods,—or at least they were called kami; for the gulf separating the Japanese from the English term can never be too often recalled to mind. The word kami, as previously mentioned, properly signifies “superior,” and it would be putting more into it than it really implies to say that the Early Japanese “deified,”—in our sense of the verb to “deify,”—the peaches which Izanagi used to pelt his assailants with, or any other natural objects whatsoever. It would, indeed, be to attribute to them a flight of imagination of which they were not capable, and a habit of personification not in accordance with the genius of their language. Some of the gods are mentioned collectively as “bad Deities like unto the flies in the fifth moon”; but there is nothing approaching a systematic division into good spirits and bad spirits. In fact the word “spirit” itself is not applicable at all to the gods of Archaic Japan. They were, like the gods of Greece, conceived of only as more powerful human beings. They were born, and some of them died, though here again there is inconsistency, as the death of some of them is mentioned in a manner leading one to suppose that they were conceived of as being then at an end, whereas in other cases such death seems simply to denote transference to Hades, or to what is called “the One Road,” which is believed to be a synonym for Hades. Sometimes, again, a journey to Hades is undertaken by a god without any reference to his death. Nothing, indeed, could be less consistent than the various details.
Hades[1] itself is another instance of this inconsistency. In the legend of Oho-Kuni-Nushi (the “Master of the Great Land”),—one of the Idzumo cycle of legends,—Hades is described exactly as if it were
- ↑ For the use of this word to represent the Japanese Yomo or Yomi, see Sect. IX., Note 1.
