Mitama

The Japanese word mitama refers to the spirit of a kami or the soul of a dead person. It is composed of two characters, the first of which, mi, is simply an honorific. The second, tama means "spirit". The character pair 神霊, also read mitama, is used exclusively to refer to a kami's spirit. Significantly, the term mitamashiro is a synonym of shintai, the object which in a Shinto shrine houses the enshrined kami. Early Japanese definitions of the mitama, developed later by many thinkers like Motoori Norinaga, maintain it consists of several "souls", relatively independent one from the other. The most developed is the ichirei shikon, a Shinto theory according to which the spirit of both kami and human beings consists of one whole spirit and four sub souls. The four souls are the ara-mitama, the nigi-mitama, the saki-mitama and the kushi-mitama. According to the theory, each of the souls making up the spirit has a character and a function of its own; they all exist at the same time, complementing each other. In the Nihon Shoki, the deity Ōnamuchi (Ōkuninushi) actually meets his kushi-mitama and saki-mitama in the form of Ōmononushi, but does not even recognize them. The four seem moreover to have a different importance, and different thinkers have described their interaction differently. Kami#History The Ara-Mitama is the rough and violent side of a spirit. A kami's first appearance is as an ara-mitama, which must be pacified with appropriate pacification rites and worship so that the nigi-mitama can appear. The Nigi-Mitama is the normal state of the kami, its functional side, while the ara-mitama appears in times of war or natural disasters. These two souls are usually considered opposites, and Motoori Norinaga believed the other two to be no more than aspects of the nigi-mitama. Ara-mitama and Nigi-mitama are in any case independent agents, so much so that they can sometimes be enshrined separately in different locations and different shintai.