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Who could even be sure that the goaded ox, the over-driven horse, or the slaughtered bird, had not formerly been a human being of closest kin, ancestor, parent, brother, sister, or child? ... Not by words only were all these things taught. It should be remembered that Shinto had no art: its ghost-houses, silent and void, were not even decorated.
But we may suppose the early ideas of the Japanese about the dead to have been much like those of the Greeks of the pre-Homeric era. There was an underground world to which spirits descended; but they were supposed to haunt by preference their own graves, or their "ghost-houses." Only by slow degrees did the notion of their power of ubiquity become evolved.
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