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The Japanese word refers to the spirit of a ''kami'' or the soul of a dead person.〔Iwanami Japanese dictionary, 6th Edition (2008), DVD version〕 It is composed of two characters, the first of which, , is a simply an honorific. The second, means "spirit". The character pair 神霊, also read ''mitama'', is used exclusively to refer to a ''kami's'' spirit. Significantly, the term is a synonym of ''shintai'', the object which in a Shinto shrine houses the enshrined ''kami''.〔 British Japanologist William George Aston (1841-1911) believed the ''mitama'' to be comparable as a concept to the Jewish Shekhinah.〔Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. XI, entry "Shinto"〕 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 , a Shinto theory according to which the of both ''kami'' and human beings consists of one spirit and four souls.〔 * 〕 The four souls are the , the , the and the . 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, ''kami'' Ōnamuchi actually meets his ''kushi-mitama'' and ''shiki-mitama'', but does not even recognize them. The four seem moreover to have a different importance, and different thinkers have described their interaction differently.〔 ==''Ara-mitama'' and ''nigi-mitama''== 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''. For example, Sumiyoshi Shrine in Shimonoseki enshrines the ''ara-mitama'' of the Sumiyoshi ''kami'', while Sumiyoshi Taisha in Osaka enshrines its ''nigi-mitama''.〔 Ise Shrine has a sub-shrine called Aramatsuri-no-miya enshrining Amaterasu's ''ara-mitama''. Atsuta-jingū has a ''sessha'' called Ichi-no-misaki Jinja for her ''ara-mitama'' and a ''massha'' called Toosu-no-yashiro for her ''nigi-mitama''. No separate enshrinement of the ''mitama'' of a ''kami'' has taken place since the rationalization and systematization of Shinto actuated by the Meiji restoration.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「mitama」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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