=Musubi, the God of Growth=.--Musubi illustrates a different conception of creation from that of the myths of Ohonamochi and Izanagi and Izanami. This God is the abstract process of growth personified--that is, a power immanent in nature and not external to it. The emotion which prompts this personification--so natural to an agricultural people--is well portrayed in the words of a Kafir to the French traveller M. Arbrouseille: "Do I know how the corn sprouts? Yesterday there was not a blade in my field: to-day I returned to the field and found some. Who can have given the earth the wisdom and power to produce it? Then I buried my head in both hands." But while the emotion is the same, the Japanese conception differs. Musubi means growth or production. It is connected with the word _umu_, to bear, to bring forth, and with _musu_, to grow, to be born. _Musu_ is said of moss growing on a stone and of ice forming on water. _Musuko_, a boy, and _musume_, a girl, contain the same element. As a God's name, Musubi is usually found with one of the laudatory adjectives, _taka_, high, or _kamu_, divine, prefixed to it. To these the honorific particle _mi_ is commonly added, giving the forms Taka-mi-musubi and Kamu-mi-musubi. Even in the _Kojiki_ and _Nihongi_ these are recognized as two distinct deities. The _Yengishiki_ (901-922) enumerates three more Musubi deities, and to these still others might be added. In poetry a single God Musubi is alone met with, and the _Wamiōshō_ recognizes but one such deity. Probably the division into several persons was an esoteric refinement of which the people took little heed. Whether we have regard to his name or to the somewhat meagre notices in the _Kojiki_ and _Nihongi_, there is nothing spiritual in the Japanese conception of Musubi. But the scribes learned in Chinese who committed the old myths to writing sometimes use characters which imply a spiritual view of his nature. They mean "producing-spirit." He is also called _mi oya_, or august parent. Hirata thinks that Taka-musubi and Kamu-musubi are husband and wife, the Kamurogi (progenitor) and Kamuromi (progenitrix) of the _norito_, and condemns his master Motoöri for holding that we have in these deities a unity in duality and a duality in unity. But his reasons are not quite convincing, and there is a passage in the _Kojiki_ which cannot be reconciled with his view. The same author points out the resemblance of this God to the Hindu Siva, who represents the fructifying principle, the generating power that pervades the universe, producing sun, moon, stars, animals, and plants. Siva is represented in his temples by a phallus, and Hirata conjectures that this was likewise the _shintai_ of Musubi. Musubi is sometimes called the Inochi no Kami, or God of life. The creation of mankind is attributed to him in a poem of the _Jiu-i-shiu_, where a rejected lover exclaims:--