Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/134

 destined to torment and afflict human beings through all ages. The eating of the forbidden fruit bequeathed to the Christian world its legacy of sorrow and suffering and its awful doctrine of original sin. The violation of a law higher than his own mandates condemned Izanagi to become the father of his children's enemies.

It will be observed that the conception of cleanliness and the birth of light are synchronised in the Japanese system. Thereafter ensues an epoch during which the spirits of evil gain sway in the newly created world, confusion and tumult increase, until at last the creator delegates to the Sun Goddess the task of restoring peace and order. She dispatches her nephew Ninigi to do the god's bidding, and by him the terrestrial divinities are induced to surrender the sceptre, though they continue during centuries to struggle for power, until Jimmu, the first mortal descendant of Ninigi, completes their subjugation.

In this cosmogony the birth of fire precedes that of light, but both constitute a part of the celestial cataclysm by which the earth is transformed from chaos to cosmos. Other pens, tracing the same story under other skies, constructed a not dissimilar version, still reverentially taught in the nurseries and churches of the Occident, — a world of indescribable matter, formless, void, and dark; the creation of land and its separation from water; a sun called into existence