=Kuni-toko-tachi=.--I place this deity provisionally among the personifications of abstractions. The name means literally "earth-eternal-stand." He is, therefore, apparently a deification of the durability of earth. Motoöri and Hirata take _toko_ as for _soko_, bottom or limit. This would make this deity a personification of the horizon, or perhaps more accurately Lucretius's "flammantia mænia mundi." He has no sex and no special characteristics. He is barely mentioned in myth, and his cult, which is comparatively modern, was no doubt, as Hirata suggests, a result of the prominent position given him in the _Nihongi_ as the first God in point of time, and as the ancestor of the Sun-Goddess, before whom he was therefore entitled to precedence. He was identified with the Taikyoku, or "Great Absolute," of the Chinese philosophers, was said to be immortal, and to comprise all the Gods in himself, was called "the name of the nameless, the form of that which has no form," and, in short, erected into a Supreme Being. In the fourteenth century an unsuccessful attempt was made to substitute him for the Food-Goddess as the deity of the outer shrine of Ise. At the present day he is worshipped at Mount Ontake, in the province of Shinano, a place much resorted to by pilgrims. O tentō-sama (august-heaven-way-personage) was probably originally a personification of the natural order of things--Laotze's _tao_, or Pindar's Νὀμος, the βασιλενς of Gods and men. But this is too abstract for the common Japanese. To them O tentō-sama is the Sun itself, endowed, it is true, with certain moral attributes. Drought and Famine deities belong to this class. None of these is of much importance. FOOTNOTES: [96] Deuteronomy iv. 19; xvii. 3. [97] The Vice-Royalty of Kiushiu. [98] In Korea. [99] See above, p. 70; also Index--'Mirror.' [100] "The mirror is kept in a box of chamaecyparis wood, which rests on a low stand covered with a piece of white silk. It is wrapped in a bag of brocade, which is never opened or renewed, but when it begins to fall to pieces from age another bag is put on, so that the actual covering consists of many layers. Over the whole is placed a sort of wooden cage, with ornaments said to be of pure gold, over which again is thrown a cloth of coarse silk falling to the floor on all sides."--Murray's 'Japan,' fifth edition, p. 308. [101] See Index--_Naishidokoro_. [102] A kind of hawk. 'Odyssey,' xv. 525. [103] _Vide_ 'The _Hinomaru_' in the _T. A. S. J._, vol. xxii. p. 27. [104] See above, p. 65. [105] 'In the Shinto Pantheon,' in the _New World_, December, 1896. [106] Japan is annually visited by destructive typhoons, accompanied by great darkness and a terrific downpour of rain. [107] See above, p. 106. [108] Egyptian is one. [109] See Index--'Sasura-hime.' [110] 'Religions of Primitive Peoples,' p. 80.