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But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him, not to 'sacrifice' him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him, live BY him and through him, by his grace." Home University Library, p. 87. Among the Ainos in the North of Japan, as also among the Gilyaks in Eastern Siberia, the Bear is the great food-animal, and is worshipped as the supreme giver of health and strength.
They share with the Ainos of Japan a people to which they have many likenesses, being of the same division of man a faith in a subterranean future. Does not Socrates, in the dialogues of Plato, often speak of "going to the world below," where he hopes to find real wisdom?
Some believe that he escaped to Yezo, where for years he dwelt among the Ainos, who to-day worship his spirit and have erected a shrine over what they claim to be his grave. The preposterous story is even advanced that he fled to Asia and became the great Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan. Whatever became of him, his name is immortal in Japan.
Vogt, Karl, on the origin of species; on the origin of man; on the semilunar fold in man; on microcephalous idiots; on the imitative faculties of microcephalous idiots; on skulls from Brazilian caves; on the evolution of the races of man; on the formation of the skull in women; on the Ainos and negroes; on the increased cranial difference of the sexes in man with race development; on the obliquity of the eye in the Chinese and Japanese.
There is, indeed, a marked resemblance between the habit of the Ainos in burying articles with the deceased for his use in the next world and that of the North American Indians. But I am not inclined to deduce any theory in reference to the origin of the Ainos from the existence of these customs.
So, too, among the Ainos of Saghalien a pregnant woman may not spin nor twist ropes for two months before her delivery, because they think that if she did so the child's guts might be entangled like the thread.
There were 20,752,366 males and 20,337,574 females, making a population of 41,089,940 souls. All these people are subjects of the one emperor, and excepting fewer than twenty thousand savages in the northern islands called Ainos, speak one language and form substantially one race. Even the Riu Kiu islanders are Japanese in language, customs and religion.
Whether or not the Ainos once inhabited the whole of the Japanese islands and trekked north to get away from their conquerors, there can be no doubt of the fact that they are in almost every respect the very antithesis of the Japanese. The latter are a smooth-skinned race, the Ainos an extremely hairy one.
The ethnic museum of mountainous Spain is more rich and varied than that of her Northern neighbors, and Italy has remnants dating back into the night of historic time in Sardinia and the Abruzzi. Japan, ancient as she is, has her Ainos of unrecorded antiquity, and the ranges of Central India are haunted by races still more primitive and unprepossessing in manners and physiognomy.
Among the tribes of the northern part of the Chinese Empire and the Ainos of Japan this Shamanism exists as something like an organized cultus. Indeed, it would be hard to find any part of Chinese Asia from Korea to Annam or from Tibet to Formosa, not dominated by this belief in the power and presence of minor spirits.
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