The Web And Loom Can Be Bundled Up In Two Minutes, And
Carried Away Quite As Easily As A Knitted Soft Blanket.
It is the
simplest and perhaps the most primitive form of hand-loom, and
comb, shuttle, and roll, are all easily fashioned with an ordinary
knife.
LETTER XXXVII - (Continued)
A Simple Nature-Worship - Aino Gods - A Festival Song - Religious
Intoxication - Bear-Worship - The Annual Saturnalia - The Future
State - Marriage and Divorce - Musical Instruments - Etiquette - The
Chieftainship - Death and Burial - Old Age - Moral Qualities.
There cannot be anything more vague and destitute of cohesion than
Aino religious notions. With the exception of the hill shrines of
Japanese construction dedicated to Yoshitsune, they have no
temples, and they have neither priests, sacrifices, nor worship.
Apparently through all traditional time their cultus has been the
rudest and most primitive form of nature-worship, the attaching of
a vague sacredness to trees, rivers, rocks, and mountains, and of
vague notions of power for good or evil to the sea, the forest, the
fire, and the sun and moon. I cannot make out that they possess a
trace of the deification of ancestors, though their rude nature
worship may well have been the primitive form of Japanese Shinto.
The solitary exception to their adoration of animate and inanimate
nature appears to be the reverence paid to Yoshitsune, to whom they
believe they are greatly indebted, and who, it is supposed by some,
will yet interfere on their behalf. {21} Their gods - that is, the
outward symbols of their religion, corresponding most likely with
the Shinto gohei - are wands and posts of peeled wood, whittled
nearly to the top, from which the pendent shavings fall down in
white curls. These are not only set up in their houses, sometimes
to the number of twenty, but on precipices, banks of rivers and
streams, and mountain-passes, and such wands are thrown into the
rivers as the boatmen descend rapids and dangerous places. Since
my baggage horse fell over an acclivity on the trail from Sarufuto,
four such wands have been placed there. It is nonsense to write of
the religious ideas of a people who have none, and of beliefs among
people who are merely adult children. The traveller who formulates
an Aino creed must "evolve it from his inner consciousness." I
have taken infinite trouble to learn from themselves what their
religious notions are, and Shinondi tells me that they have told me
all they know, and the whole sum is a few vague fears and hopes,
and a suspicion that there are things outside themselves more
powerful than themselves, whose good influences may be obtained, or
whose evil influences may be averted, by libations of sake.
The word worship is in itself misleading. When I use it of these
savages it simply means libations of sake, waving bowls and waving
hands, without any spiritual act of deprecation or supplication.
In such a sense and such alone they worship the sun and moon (but
not the stars), the forest, and the sea.
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