part of the land of the living, or exactly as if it were Heaven, which indeed comes to the same thing. It has its trees, its houses, its family quarrels, etc., etc. In the legend of Izanagi, on the other hand, Hades means simply the abode of horrible putrefaction and of the vindictive dead, and is fitly described by the god himself who had ventured thither as “a hideous and polluted land.” The only point in which the legends agree is in placing between the upper earth and Hades a barrier called the “Even Pass (or Hill) of Hades.” The state of the dead in general is nowhere alluded to, nor are the dying ever made to refer to a future world, whether good or evil.
The objects of worship were of course the gods, or some of them. It has already been stated that during the later portions of the story, whose scene is laid almost exclusively on earth, the Sun-Goddess, the deity Izasa-Wake, the Divine Sword of Isonokami, the Small August Deity (Sukuna-Mi-Kami), the “Great Gods” of Miwa and of Kadzuraki and the three Water-Deities of Sumi, alone are mentioned as having been specially worshipped. Of these the first and the last appear together, forming a sort of quaternion, while the other five appear singly and have no connection with each other. The deities of the mountains, the deities of the rivers, the deities of the sea, etc., are also mentioned in the aggregate, as are likewise the heavenly deities and the earthly deities; and the Empress Jin-gō is represented as conciliating them all previous to her departure for Korea by “putting into a gourd the ashes of a maki tree,[1] and likewise making a quantity of chopsticks and also of leaf-platters, and scattering them all on the waves.”
This brings us to the subject of religious rites,—a subject on which we long for fuller information than the texts afford.[2] That the conciliatory offerings made to the gods were of a miscellaneous nature will be expected from the quotation just made. Nevertheless, a very natural method was in the main followed; for the people offered the things by which they themselves set most store, as we hear at a later period of the poet Tsurayuki, when in a storm at sea, flinging his mirror into the waves because he had but one. The Early Japanese made offerings of
