of the Japanese archipelago. When they have finished producing islands, they proceed to the production of a large number of gods and goddesses, many of whom correspond to what we should call personifications of the powers of nature, though personification is a word which, in its legitimate acceptation, is foreign to the Japanese mind. The birth of the Fire-God causes Izanami’s death, and the most striking episode of the whole mythology then ensues, when her husband, Orpheus-like, visits her in the under-world to implore her to return to him. She would willingly do so, and bids him wait while she consults with the deities of the place. But he, impatient at her long tarrying, breaks off one of the end-teeth of the comb stuck in the left bunch of his hair, lights it and goes in, only to find her a hideous mass of corruption, in whose midst are seated the eight Gods of Thunder. This episode ends with the deification[1] of three peaches who had assisted him in his retreat before the armies of the under-world, and with bitter words exchanged between him and his wife, who herself pursues him as far as the “Even Pass of Hades.”
Returning to Himuka in south-western Japan, Izanagi purifies himself by bathing in a stream, and, as he does so, fresh deities are born from each article of clothing that he throws down on the river-bank, and from each part of his person. One of these deities was the Sun-Goddess, who was born from his left eye, while the Moon-God sprang from his right eye, and the last born of all, Susa-no-Wo, whose name the translator renders by “the Impetuous Male,” was born from his nose. Between these three children their father divides the inheritance of the universe.
At this point the story loses its unity. The Moon-God is no more heard of, and the traditions concerning the Sun-Goddess and those concerning the “Impetuous Male Deity” diverge in a manner which is productive of inconsistencies in the remainder of the mythology. The Sun-Goddess and the “Impetuous Male Deity” have a violent quarrel, and at last the latter breaks a hole in the roof of the hall in Heaven where his sister is sitting at work with the celestial weaving-maidens, and through it lets fall “a heavenly piebald horse which he had flayed
- ↑ Conf. p. xvii, last paragraph for the modified sense in which alone the word “deification” can be used in speaking of the Early Japanese worship.
