Save with official permission, one could not even become a Buddhist monk. The very outcasts--such as the Eta classes--formed self-governing communities, with traditions of their own, and would not voluntarily accept strangers. So the banished man was most often doomed to become a hinin,--one of that wretched class of wandering pariahs who were officially termed "not-men," and lived by beggary, or by the exercise of some vulgar profession, such as that of ambulant musician or [99] mountebank. In more ancient days a banished man could have sold himself into slavery; but even this poor privilege seems to have been withdrawn during the Tokugawa era. We can scarcely imagine to-day the conditions of such banishment: to find a Western parallel we must go back to ancient Greek and Roman times long preceding the Empire. Banishment then signified religious excommunication, and practically expulsion from all civilized society,--since there yet existed no idea of human brotherhood, no conception of any claim upon kindness except the claim of kinship. The stranger was everywhere the enemy. Now in Japan, as in the Greek city of old time, the religion of the tutelar god has always been the religion of a group only, the cult of a community: it never became even the religion of a province. The higher cults, on the other hand, did not concern themselves with the individual: his religion was only of the household and of the village or district; the cults of other households and districts were entirely distinct; one could belong to them only by adoption, and strangers, as a rule, were not adopted. Without a household or a clan-cult, the individual was morally and socially dead; for other cults and clans excluded him. When cast out by the domestic cult that regulated his private life, and by the local cult that ordered his life in relation to the community, he simply ceased to exist in relation to human society. [100] How small were the chances in past times for personality to develop and assert itself may be imagined from the foregoing facts. The individual was completely and pitilessly sacrificed to the community. Even now the only safe rule of conduct in a Japanese settlement is to act in all things according to local custom; for the slightest divergence from rule will be observed with disfavour. Privacy does not exist; nothing can be hidden; everybody's vices or virtues are known to everybody else. Unusual behaviour is judged as a departure from the traditional standard of conduct; all oddities are condemned as departures from custom; and tradition and custom still have the force of religious obligations. Indeed, they really are religious and obligatory, not only by reason of their origin, but by reason of their relation also to the public cult, which signifies the worship of the past.