These deities had no temples. The festivals in their honour took place at crossways on the four sides of the capital, or at the frontier of the metropolitan province, regularly at the close of the sixth and twelfth months, and at other times upon occasions of emergency. Thus in 735, during an epidemic, the Governor of Dazaifu in Kiushiu was ordered to celebrate a _michi-ahe_, or Road festival, and in 839 the Mikado directed that honours should be paid to the Gods of Pestilence. A ceremony in honour of the Sahe no kami was also performed two days before the arrival of foreign envoys in the capital, in order to guard against the danger of their bringing with them infection, evil influences, or demons from abroad.[157] A work entitled 'Fusô Ryakki' states that in 938 Gods were carved in wood and set up face to face along the highways and byways, or female forms were made and set up opposite to males. Children worshipped them boisterously, and made reverent offerings of pieces of cloth and fragrant flowers. They were called Chimata no kami, that is to say "Gods of the Crossways," or Mitama (august spirits), a term which in its Chinese form Goryō is still preserved in the name of the great festival (Goryōye) of Gion at Kiôto. The Chimata no kami can be no other than Yachimata-hiko and Yachimata-hime. A later notice speaks of the worship of wooden figures, male and female, provided with sexual organs. Similar figures in stone may still, Hirata says, be seen in the eastern provinces, where they are sometimes mistaken for Jizō, the Buddhist children's God, and honoured in the temples. The third of the Sahe no kami of the _norito_, namely, Kunado, can be nothing but a simple phallus. Its shape, formed of Izanagi's staff, is consistent with this view. In the Tsujiura, or Cross Roads divination, this God was represented by a staff. The same inference is suggested by its association with Yachimata-hiko and Yachimata-hime, who, as we have seen, were unquestionably phallic deities; and also with the peach, which, like Kunado himself, was used by Izanagi for his protection against the evil beings of Yomi. Like the apricot in India and the pomegranate in ancient Greece, the peach is in China and Japan the acknowledged representative of the _kteis_, as the pestle and the mushroom are of the phallus. Peach-wood staves were used in the _oni-yarahi_ (demon-expelling) ceremony on the last day of the year. A similar interpretation is, perhaps, applicable to the horseshoes nailed over doors in England which, intended at first to keep out evil spirits, are now meant simply "for luck," in accordance with the tendency for the more special functions of Gods and magical appliances to become obscured and merged in a hazy, general notion of their beneficence or usefulness. Peach-shaped charms from China figure in a London tradesman's catalogue which has just reached me.