Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/342

302 families of local chieftains, and worshipped by them. The Sun-Goddess was born from the washing of his left eye, and the Moon-God from that of his right, while a third deity named Susa no wo was generated from the washing of his nose. To the Sun-Goddess Izanagi gave charge of the "Plain of High-Heaven," and to the Moon-God was allotted the realm of Night. Susa no wo was at first appointed to rule the sea, but he preferred to rejoin his deceased mother Izanami, and was therefore made the Lord of Ne-no-kuni, i.e. the Root or Nether Country, another name for the Land of Yomi.

Izanagi's ablutions represent a widespread rite. They remind us of Juno's lustration by Iris after a visit to Hades, and of Dante's immersion in Lethe when he had completed his ascent through Purgatory and was preparing for admission to the circles of Paradise. They are clearly the mythical counterpart of a custom described by Chinese travellers to Japan centuries before the Kojiki and Nihongi were written. It was then, we are informed, the practice, when the funeral was over, for the whole family of the deceased to go into the water and wash.

From this and other passages it would appear that ancestor-worship in ancient Japan was a very different institution from the Chinese form of this cult. In China its principal objects were, and are, the deceased parents of the worshipper. But in ancient Japan the ancestral deity was a remote mythical personage, who to all appearance had never been a human being, but a divinity of the mythical world to whom his worshippers and so-called descendants were no more related than the Heracleidae to Hercules, the Romans to Venus, or, it may be added, the Mikados to the Sun. These mythical ancestors are not eponymous.

The circumstance that the Sun-Goddess was produced from the left and the Moon-God from the right eye of Izanagi is suggestive of the influence of China, where the left takes precedence of the right. The Chinese myth of