priestly garb, and practised Shinto) rites of purification while engaged in the making of a good blade. Before his smithy was then suspended the sacred rope of rice-straw (shime-nawa), which is the oldest symbol of Shinto: none even of his family might enter there, or speak to him; and he ate only of food cooked with holy fire. The 195,000 shrines of Shinto represent, however, more than clan-cults or guild-cults or national-cults .... [126] Many are dedicated to different spirits of the same god; for Shinto holds that the spirit of either a man or a god may divide itself into several spirits, each with a different character. Such separated spirits are called waka-mi-tama ("august-divided-spirits"). Thus the spirit of the Goddess of Food, Toyo-uke-bime, separated itself into the God of Trees, Kukunochi-no-Kami, and into the Goddess of Grasses, Kayanu-hime-no-Kami. Gods and men were supposed to have also a Rough Spirit and a Gentle Spirit; and Hirata remarks that the Rough Spirit of Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami was worshipped at one temple, and his Gentle Spirit at another.*... Also we have to remember that great numbers of Ujigami temples are dedicated to the same divinity. These duplications or multiplications are again offset by the fact that in some of the principal temples a multitude of different deities are enshrined. Thus the number of Shinto temples in actual existence affords no indication whatever of the actual number of gods worshipped, nor of the variety of their cults. Almost every deity mentioned in the Ko-ji-ki or Nihongi has a shrine somewhere; and hundreds of others--including many later apotheoses--have their temples. Numbers of temples have been dedicated, for example, to [127] historical personages,--to spirits of great ministers, captains, rulers, scholars, heroes, and statesmen. The famous minister of the Empress Jingo, Takeno-uji-no-Sukune,--who served under six successive sovereigns, and lived to the age of three hundred years,--is now invoked in many a temple as a giver of long life and great wisdom. The spirit of Sugiwara-no-Michizane, once minister to the Emperor Daigo, is worshipped as the god of calligraphy, under the name of Tenjin, or Temmangu: children everywhere offer to him the first examples of their handwriting, and deposit in receptacles, placed before his shrine, their worn-out writing-brushes. The Soga brothers, victims and heroes of a famous twelfth-century tragedy, have become gods to whom people pray for the maintenance of fraternal harmony. Kato Kiyomasa, the determined enemy of Jesuit Christianity, and Hideyoshi's greatest captain, has been apotheosized both by Buddhism and by Shinto. Iyeyasu is worshipped under the appellation of Toshogu. In fact most of the great men of Japanese history have had temples erected to them; and the spirits of the daimyo were, in former years, regularly worshipped by the subjects of their descendants and successors.