with the place of sepulture. Only at a much later time did this dim
underworld of imagination expand and divide into regions of ghostly
bliss and woe .... It is a noteworthy fact that Japanese mythology
never evolved the ideas of an Elysium or a Tartarus,--never developed
the notion of a heaven or a hell. Even to this day Shinto belief
represents the pre-Homeric stage of imagination as regards the
supernatural.

Among the Indo-European races likewise there appeared to have been at
first no difference between gods and ghosts, nor any ranking of gods
as greater [26] and lesser. These distinctions were gradually
developed. "The spirits of the dead," says Mr. Spencer, "forming, in
a primitive tribe, an ideal group the members of which are but little
distinguished from one another, will grow more and more
distinguished;--and as societies advance, and as traditions, local
and general, accumulate and complicate, these once similar human
souls, acquiring in the popular mind differences of character and
importance, will diverge--until their original community of nature
becomes scarcely recognizable." So in antique Europe, and so in the
Far East, were the greater gods of nations evolved from ghost-cults;
but those ethics of ancestor-worship which shaped alike the earliest
societies of West and East, date from a period before the time of the
greater gods,--from the period when all the dead were supposed to
become gods, with no distinction of rank.

No more than the primitive ancestor-worshippers of Aryan race did the
early Japanese think of their dead as ascending to some extra-mundane
region of light and bliss, or as descending into some realm of
torment. They thought of their dead as still inhabiting this world,
or at least as maintaining with it a constant communication. Their