south, what means the rabbit's foot carried in the pocket or the various
articles of faith now hanging in the limbo between religion and
folk-lore in various parts of our own country?


Phallicism.


Further illustrations of far Eastern Animism and Fetichism are seen in
forms once vastly more prevalent in Japan than now. Indeed, so far
improved off the face of the earth are they, that some are already
matters of memory or archæology, and their very existence even in former
days is nearly or wholly incredible to the generation born since
1868--when Old Japan began to vanish in dissolving views and New Japan
to emerge. What the author has seen with his own eyes, would amaze many
Japanese born since 1868 and the readers of the rhapsodies of tourists
who study Japan from the _jin-riki-sha_. Phases of tree and serpent
worship are still quite common, and will be probably for generations to
come; but the phallic shrines and emblems abolished by the government in
1872 have been so far invisible to most living travellers and natives,
that their once general existence and use are now scarcely suspected.
Even profound scholars of the Japanese language and literature whose
work dates from after the year 1872 have scarcely suspected the
universality of phallic worship. Yet what we could say of this cult and
its emblems, especially in treating of Shint[=o], the special ethnic
faith of Japan, would be from sight of our own eyes besides the
testimony of many witnesses.[20]

The cultus has been known in the Japanese archipelago from Riu Kin to
Yezo. Despite official edicts of abolition it is still secretly