=Spiritism.=—The gods of ancient Shinto are, on the whole, as unspiritual beings as the gods of Olympus. Their doings are modelled on those of living men and women, not on those of ghosts. When Izanagi followed his wife Izanami to the land of the dead he found there not a spirit, but a putrefying corpse. Ghosts are as absent from the _Kojiki_ and _Nihongi_ as they are from the Old Testament Scriptures. Herbert Spencer’s ghost-theory of the origin of religion derives no support from the Japanese evidence. There is, however, a spiritual element in Shinto which demands notice. Some of the gods are represented as having _mitama_ (august jewels or souls) which reside invisibly in their temples and are the means of communication between Heaven and this world. The Earth or Kosmos deity Ohonamochi had a _mitama_ (double) which appeared to him in a divine radiance illuminating the sea, and obtained from him a promise that, in consideration of the assistance the latter had rendered in reducing the world to order, he should have a shrine consecrated to him at Mimoro. Susa no wo’s _mitama_ was ‘settled’ at Susa in Idzumo. The element _tama_ (soul) enters into the names of several deities. This implies a more or less spiritual conception of their nature. Sometimes we hear of two _mitama_, one of a gentle, the other of a violent nature. There are only one or two cases of deceased men having mitama. In one of these the mitama takes the shape of a bird. Metamorphoses are frequently mentioned in the old legends. =Shekinah.=—As in the analogous case of the Shekinah of Judaism, the doctrine of the mitama of gods apparently does not arise from that of the separability of the human soul and body. It seems rather to have been invented in order to smooth over the difficulty of conceiving how the gods of Heaven can exercise their power and hear and answer prayer in their shrines on earth. It may, however, owe something to the notion of separate human souls, which, though we do not find it in the older Japanese records, is familiar to races of a much lower degree of civilisation.