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A Category, Not a Pantheon

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A Category, Not a Pantheon

The atlas holds Kamuy as an entry in its own right, and the reason is that Ainu religion does not have the shape the deity table normally assumes. There is no fixed list of gods with names, ranks and portfolios, no priesthood keeping the list, and no scripture in which the list is written down. There is a word, kamuy, and a relationship the word describes, and named figures come out of it as required.

A kamuy lives in kamuy mosir, the land of the kamuy, where it has a house, a family and a form much like a person's. To come here it puts on a body. The bear a hunter meets is a kamuy dressed as a bear, and the meat and the pelt are the presents a guest brings. What is owed in return is hospitality: food, drink, courtesy, and a proper send-off home, at which point the borrowed body is left behind and the guest returns to speak of how it was treated.

The consequence is that the relationship, and not the being, is the unit. Whether a particular mountain, a particular illness or a particular carved tool counts as a kamuy is answered by whether it is being dealt with as one, and the boundary is not policed. Ranking works the same way: the kamuy of fire is the one every household deals with daily, and the kamuy of the mountains is the one the great ceremony concerns, but there is no throne and nobody sits on it.

The counterpart of kamuy is aynu, human being. The two words define each other, and the word the Ainu use for themselves is one half of that pair.

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The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.