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. The Ainos of Yezo may be called
Shamanists or Animists; that is, their minds are cramped and confused by
their belief in a multitude of inferior spirits whom they worship and
propitiate by rites and incantations through their medicine-man or
sorcerer. How they whittle sticks, keeping on the fringe of curled
shavings, and set up these, called _inao_ in places whence evil is
suspected to lurk, and how the shaman conducts his exorcisms and works
his healings, are told in the works of the traveller and the
missionary.[13] In the wand of shavings thus reared we see the same
motive as that which induced the Mikado in the eighth century to build
the great monasteries on Hiyeizan, northeast of Ki[=o]to, this being the
quarter in which Buddhist superstition locates the path of advancing
evil, to ward off malevolence by litanies and incense. Or, the _inao_ is
a sort of lightning-rod conductor by which impending mischief may be led
harmlessly away.

Yet, besides the Ainos,[14] there are millions of Japanese who are
Shamanists, even though they know not the name or organized cult. And if
we make use of the term Shamanism instead of the more exact one of
Animism, it is for the very purpose of illustrating our contention that
the underlying paganisms of the Japanese archipelago, unwritten and
unformulated, are older than the religions founded on books; and that
these paganisms, still vital and persistent, constantly modify and
corrupt the recognized religious. The term Shaman, a Pali word, was
originally a pure Buddhist term meaning one who has separated from his
family and his passions. One of the designations of the Buddha was
Shamana-Gautama. The same word, Shamon, in Japanese still means a bonze,
or Buddhist priest. Its appropriation by the sorcerers, medicine-men,
and lords of the misrule of superstition in Mongolia and Manchuria shows
decisively how indigenous paganism has corrupted the Buddhism of
northern Asia even as it has caused its decay in Japan.

As out of Animism or Shamanism grows Fetichism in which a visible object
is found for the abode or medium of the spirit, so also, out of the same
soil arises what we may call Imaginary Zooelogy. In