'Can they be seen?'
'Nay: they are like the air is. To and fro upon the Ridge of the Roof they move, like a little wind.'
'Why do they not stay upon the roof for fifty days instead of forty- nine?'
'Seven weeks is the time allotted them before they must depart: seven weeks make the measure of forty-nine days. But why this should be, I cannot tell.'
I was not unaware of the ancient belief that the spirit of a dead man haunts for a time the roof of his dwelling, because it is referred to quite impressively in many Japanese dramas, among others in the play called Kagami-yama, which makes the people weep. But I had not before heard of triplex and quadruplex and other yet more highly complex Souls; and I questioned Kinjuro vainly in the hope of learning the authority for his beliefs. They were the beliefs of his fathers: that was all he knew. [1]
Like most Izumo folk, Kinjuro was a Buddhist as well as a Shintoist. As the former he belonged to the Zen-shu, as the latter to the Izumo- Taisha. Yet his ontology seemed to me not of either. Buddhism does not teach the doctrine of compound-multiple Souls. There are old Shinto books inaccessible to the multitude which speak of a doctrine very remotely akin to Kinjuro's; but Kinjuro had never seen them. Those books say that each of us has two souls—the Ara-tama or Rough Soul, which is vindictive; and the Nigi-tama, or Gentle Soul, which is all-forgiving. Furthermore, we are all possessed by the spirit of Oho-maga-tsu-hi-no- Kami, the 'Wondrous Deity of Exceeding Great Evils'; also by the spirit of Oho-naho-bi-no-Kami, the 'Wondrous Great Rectifying Deity,' a counteracting influence. These were not exactly the ideas of Kinjuro. But I remembered something Hirata wrote which reminded me of Kinjuro's words about a possible separation of souls. Hirata's teaching was that the ara-tama of a man may leave his body, assume his shape, and without his knowledge destroy a hated enemy. So I asked Kinjuro about it. He said he had never heard of a nigi-tama or an ara-tama; but he told me this:
'Master, when a man has been discovered by his wife to be secretly enamoured of another, it sometimes happens that the guilty woman is seized with a sickness that no physician can cure. For one of the Souls of the wife, moved exceedingly by anger, passes into the body of that woman to destroy her. But the wife also sickens, or loses her mind awhile, because of the absence of her Soul.
'And there is another and more wonderful thing known to us of Nippon, which you, being of the West, may never have heard. By the power of the gods, for a righteous purpose, sometimes a Soul may be withdrawn a little while from its body, and be made to utter its most secret thought. But no suffering to the body is then caused. And the wonder is wrought in this wise:
'A man loves a beautiful girl whom he is at liberty to marry; but he doubts whether he can hope to make her love him in return. He seeks the kannushi of a certain Shinto temple, [2] and tells of his doubt, and asks the aid of the gods to solve it. Then the priests demand, not his name, but his age and the year and day and hour of his birth, which they write down for the gods to know; and they bid the man return to the temple after the space of seven days.
'And during those seven days the priests offer prayer to the gods that the doubt may be solved; and one of them each morning bathes all his body in cold, pure water, and at each repast eats only food prepared with holy fire. And on the eighth day the man returns to the temple, and enters an inner chamber where the priests receive him.