610 ANNUAL EEPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



expansion. Man fears the mighty phenomena of nature, but he can 

 befriend them. The inner impulse of all living beings to preserve 

 and increase life impelled man to draw to himself all that was helpful 

 in nature, to embrace it, and to enter into a permanent covenant with 

 it by means of all those sacred rites as primitive man knew them. 

 The instinctive desire after more, the craving after the great and 

 sublime, generated religion in mankind. Deep at the bottom of such 

 primeval life, I believe we must look for the true psychological and 

 at the same time the metaphysical root of religion, and, in particular, 

 of Shintoism. 



In this stage of religious development the Japanese people was 

 found when the first emperor, Jimmu, already known to us, accom- 

 plished his splendid conquest. As has already been said, this people 

 allied itself to the Sun goddess and called itself the offspring of that 

 deit}', and the later Japanese veneration of the emperors has its ori- 

 gin in this. The political change also brought about a religious 

 revolution. The religion of the Idzumo, in which nature-worship 

 played the foremost part, and the religion of the Sun people, in 

 which hero-worship predominated over nature-worship, met and 

 united. The hero-worship of the victorious ones was not able to 

 drive out the nature-worship of the conquered people; of many 

 reasons for this only one may be mentioned here. The successors of 

 the great Jimmu were not strong men. Thej^ achieved neither ex- 

 pansion of the imperial power nor of ci\'ilization. Only after the 

 lapse of about four centuries is an energetic emperor again on the 

 scene, who, for the first time in the history of Japan, created a system 

 of taxation and dug ponds for irrigating works, and started expedi- 

 tions to unknown northeastern regions. Unfortunately a pestilence 

 broke out among the men, claiming thousands of victims. In the 

 course of centuries just elapsed the enterprising, energetic life has 

 sunk, and with it also the religion. It is not astonishing then that 

 we see the cause of the misfortune ascribed to the anger of the gods, 

 particularly the gods of the subjugated Idzumo. Hence there fol- 

 lowed a restoration of the forgotten gods. Numerous temples were 

 erected to these gods and abundant sacrifices were offered to them. 

 The defeated gods experienced a revival. The spirit of the con- 

 quered people avenged itself on its conciuerors, becoming their 

 spiritual rulers. A strange mixture. Even at present the two strains 

 (sharply separable) can be discerned in Shintoism. There are two 

 principal Shinto shrines, one at Ise, where Ama-terasu, the Sun 

 goddess is worshipped, and the other at Idzumo, where Onamuchi, 

 the former rival of the Sun goddess, is venerated. These two strains 

 must be kept clearly in view for a better understanding of Shintoism. 

 The Idzumo influence of nature-worship forms the background of the 



