The religious notions of the prehistoric Japanese were founded on the myths relating to their ancestor. Notwithstanding the vast number of deities who came into existence according to tradition, most of them vanish as soon as they are named and are no more heard of. Even deities like Izanagi and Izanami, who are represented as taking so important a part in events, are not perpetuated as objects of worship in Japanese history, and have no temples erected to their memory and no service prescribed or maintained in their honor. The most important deity in the Pantheon of the Japanese was Amaterasu-ō-mi-kami, who is also called in Chinese characters Tensho Daijin or the Sun Goddess. She appears not only in the myths concerning the origin of the Japanese race, but as the grandmother of the divine prince Hiko-ho-no-ni-nigi, who first came down to rule the Japanese empire. In the Shintō temples at Isé the principal deity worshipped at Gekū is Uké-moche-no-Kami, and the secondary deities Ninigi-no-Mikoto, who came down to found the Japanese empire and was the grandmother of the Emperor Jimmu, and two others. At the Naikū the principal deity is Amaterasu-ō-mi-kami (from heaven shining great deity), also called the Sun Goddess, and two secondary deities. The temples at Isé, especially those that are dedicated to the Sun Goddess, are the most highly regarded of any in Japan. Other temples of considerable popularity are situated in other parts of the empire. Thus there are Shintō temples in Kyūshū and in Izumo, which are old parts of Japan settled long before Buddhism was introduced. The Shintō religion must be regarded as the primitive religion of the Japanese people. It prevailed among them long before Buddhism was propagated by priests from Korea. It differs from all known systems of religion, in having no body of dogma by which its adherents are held together. The greatest advocate of Shintoism, Moto-ori, a writer of the 18th century, admits that it has no moral code. He asserts that “morals(69) were invented by the Chinese because they were an immoral people, but in Japan there was no necessity for any system of morals, as every Japanese acted rightly if he only consulted his own heart.” Reference is frequently made in the early stories to divination, or the process of obtaining the will of the gods by indirection. The oldest method of divination was by using the shoulder-blade of a deer. It was scraped entirely free from flesh, and then placed over a fire made from cherry wood. The divine will was determined by the cracks caused by the fire in the bone. A later method of divination was by using the shell of a tortoise in the same way as the shoulder-blade of the deer was used. They had superstitions about fighting with the back to the sun; about using only one light in the house at once; about breaking off the teeth of a comb in the night-time; about the destination of the first arrow shot in battle, etc.