In the Idzumo Fudoki, Susa no wo speaks of the village of Susa as the place where his mitama was settled, that is to say, where a shrine was dedicated to him. The Nihongi states that Izanami's mitama was worshipped at Kumano with music and offerings of flowers. In a modern book the Hi no mitama (spirit of the Sun) is not the Sun-Goddess, but a separate deity of a lower class.
The element tama enters into the names of several deities. The Food-Goddess is called either Ukemochi no Kami or Uka no mitama.[13] But the meaning "spirit" is not applicable in every case in which a God's name contains this element. Futo-dama, for example, the name of the supposed ancestor of the Imbe priestly corporation, probably means "great gift or offering." Yorodzu-dama no Kami is not the God of ten thousand spirits, but the God of ten thousand offerings.
It is a curious circumstance that in later times the mitama par excellence were the phallic Sahe no Kami. Their festival was formerly called the mitama matsuri. It is now known by the Chinese equivalent Goriōye.
In a few cases the mitama is in duplicate, a nigi-mitama, or gentle spirit, and an ara-mitama, or rough spirit.[14] In the Idzumo Fudoki a man who is praying for revenge calls upon the nigi-tama of the Oho-kami (great deity) to remain quiet, and asks the ara-tama to attend to his petition. The legendary Empress Jingo was attended on her expedition to Korea by two such sea-god mitama, one to guard her person, the other to lead the van of her army. But we hear little of this distinction in the older records. The aragami-matsuri (rough-God-festival) of later days was a sort of saturnalia when license was permitted to servants.
The Kojiki and Nihongi do not theorize about the mitama. Hirata's statement that they do not distinguish between the utsushi-mi-mi (real-august-body)[15] and the mitama of the Gods is, as the case of Ohonamochi shows, not quite correct. But there is much foundation for it. In one myth, for example, the Sun-Goddess in handing over the divine mirror to Ninigi, enjoins on him to regard it as her mitama, and in another version of the story to look upon it as herself.
Another indication of an advance towards spirituality in the older Shinto literature is the distinction which is made between araha-goto (public things) and kakure-goto (hidden things), the former term being applied to temporal and the latter to spiritual matters, namely, the service of the unseen Gods. Mystery is not the vital element of religion. It depends on what we know, not on what we do not know. Still, there perhaps never was a religion which did not betray some feeling that what we know is only an infinitesimal portion of that infinite sum of knowledge for which mankind is possessed with an eternal yearning. Religion, though not based in mystery, must always proceed, like other knowledge, from the known towards the unknown. A good deal, however, that is mysterious in religion is of our own making. Hirata, when he can find no way out of the difficulties arising from his crude, literal-minded anthropomorphism, constantly resorts to the time-honoured expedient of declaring his problems mysteries which transcend human intelligence, exclaiming, "Oh! how wonderful! Oh! how strange! Oh! how strange! Oh! how wonderful!"
Motoöri and Hirata account for the invisibility of such Gods as Musubi, the God of Growth, by the theory that since the Age of the Gods they have removed further from the earth, so that they are now beyond the scope of human vision. In other respects, however, they have, under unacknowledged Chinese influence, greatly developed the hints of the spiritual nature of the Gods which are found in the Kojiki and Nihongi. Of the mitama, Motoöri says[16]:--
"In general, when such or such a God is mentioned in the old scriptures, we must distinguish between the real God and his mitama. The real God is his actual body; the mitama is his divine spirit: the mitama-shiro (spirit-token) is the thing, be it a mirror or aught else, to which the divine spirit attaches itself. It is commonly called the Shintai (God-body). Now both the real body and the spirit are spoken of simply as the God. Thus when we are told that Ama-terasu no Ohokami was entrusted to Toyo-suki-iri-bime and Yamato no Oho-kuni-dama to Nunaki-iri-bime, it is not to be supposed that the real bodies of these two deities were in the Imperial Palace. It is unquestionably their mitama-shiro which are spoken of as if they were the real bodies.... Again, when we are told in the history of the same reign that the Mikado assembled the eighty myriads of Gods on the plain of Kami-asachi and inquired of them by divination, this is not like the assembly in the divine age of the real Gods in the Plain of High Heaven. The invitation is to their mitama."
The same writer says that of the attendant deities who came down from Heaven with Ninigi, some came in their real bodies, some as mitama. Among the former he naturally classes all those who are represented as having human descendants. Hirata regards this as a discovery which will endure to all ages.
The following quotation from Hirata's Koshiden (vi. 9) illustrates further the ideas of this school of theology regarding the spiritual nature of the Gods:--