Notwithstanding, however, the general prevalence, at the time when Japan first became known to Europeans, of the doctrine of Buddha,—of which there would seem to have been quite a number of distinct observances, not unlike the different orders of monks and friars in the Catholic Church,—it appears, as well from the memoirs of the Jesuit missionaries, as from more exact and subsequent observations made by residents in the Dutch service, that there also existed another and more ancient religious system, with which the person and authority of the Dairi had been and still were closely identified. This system[30] was known as the religion of _Shintō_, or of the _Kami_,—a name given not only to the seven mythological personages, or celestial gods, who compose the first Japanese dynasty, and to the five demigods, or terrestrial gods, who compose the second (two dynasties which, as in the similar mythology of the Egyptians and Hindus, were imagined to have extended through immense and incomprehensible ages preceding the era of Jimmu), but including also the whole series of the Dairi, who traced their descent from the first of the demigods, and who, though regarded during their lives as mere men, yet at their deaths underwent, as in the case of the Roman Cæsars, a regular apotheosis, by which they were added to the number of the Kami, or Shin,—words both of which had the same signification, namely, inhabitants of heaven.[31] A like apotheosis was also extended to all who had seemed to deserve it by their sanctity, their miracles, or their great benefactions. The Kami of the first dynasty, the seven superior gods, being regarded as too elevated above the earth to concern themselves in what is passing on it, the chief object of the worship of the adherents of this ancient system was the goddess Tenshō-daijin,[32] already mentioned as the first of the demigods, and the supposed progenitor of the Dairi, and of the whole order of the Kuge. Of this Tenshō-daijin, and of her heroic and miraculous deeds, a vast many fables were in circulation. Even those who had quitted the ancient religion to embrace the new sects paid a sort of worship to the pretended mother of the Japanese nation; and there was not a considerable city in the empire in which there was not a temple to her honor. On the other hand, the religion of the Kami, by its doctrine of the apotheosis of all great saints and great heroes, gave, like the old pagan religions, a hospitable reception to all new gods, so that even the rival demigod, Buddha, came to be regarded by many as identical with Tenshō-daijin,—a circumstance which will serve to explain the great intermixture of religious ideas found in Japan, and the alleged fact, very remarkable, if true, that, till after the arrival of the Portuguese missionaries, religious persecution had never been known there.