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Updated: June 2, 2025
He then instructs the old man and his wife to build a fence with eight gates, placing in every gate a vat of rice wine. Presently the serpent arrives, drinks the wine, and laying down its heads to sleep, is cut to pieces by Susanoo with his ten-span sabre.
*Professor Takashima has found magatama among the relics of the primitive culture, but that is probably the result of imitation. The goddess of the Sun, when awaiting the encounter with Susanoo, twisted a complete string, eight feet long, with five hundred magatama. Lesser Kami were created by manipulating the jewels.
Susanoo hands his sword to Amaterasu-o-mi-Kami, who breaks it into three pieces, chews the fragments, and blowing them from her mouth, produces three female Kami. She then lends her string of five hundred jewels to Susanoo and, he, in turn, crunches them in his mouth and blows out the fragments which are transformed into five male Kami.
She had three regions of her own specially devoted to rice growing, and her unruly brother, Susanoo, had a similar number, but the latter proved barren. The same goddess inaugurated sericulture, and entrusted the care of it to a princess, who caused mulberry trees to be planted and was able to present silk fabrics to Amaterasu. He also planted various kinds of fruit-trees.
It is, nevertheless, from among the children born on the occasion of the contest between the Sun goddess and Susanoo that the Great-Name Possessor first seeks a spouse the Princess of the Torrent Mist to lay the foundation of fifteen generations of Kami, whose birth seems to have been essential to the "making of the land," though their names afford no clue to the functions discharged by them.
Susanoo then builds for himself and Lady Wonderful a palace at Suga in Izumo, and composes a celebrated verse of Japanese poetry.* Sixth in descent from the offspring of this union is the "Kami of the great land," called also the "Great-Name Possessor," or the "Kami of the reed plains," or the "Kami of the eight thousand spears," or the "Kami of the great land of the living," the last name being antithetical to Susanoo's title of "Ruler of Hades."
By the misogi the body was cleansed; by the harai all offences were expiated; the origin of the latter rite having been the exaction of certain penalties from Susanoo for his violent conduct towards the Sun goddess.* The two ceremonies, physical cleansing and moral cleansing, prepared a worshipper to approach the shrine of the Kami.
As for the idea of blocking the "even pass of hades" with rocks, it appears to mean nothing more than that a military force was posted at Hirasaka now called Ifuyo-saka in Izumo to hold the defile against the insurgent troops under Izanami, who finally took the field against Izanagi. The story of Susanoo lends itself with equal facility to rationalization.
It is a huge monster, extending over eight valleys and eight hills, its eyes red like winter cherries, its belly bloody and inflamed, and its back overgrown with moss and conifers. Susanoo, having announced himself as the brother of the Sun goddess, receives Lady Wonderful and at once transforms her into a comb which he places in his hair.
A much abler work, Izuma Fudoki, speaks of Cape Kitsuki in Izumo as a place where cotton-stuffs were imported from Shiragi by Omitsu, son of Susanoo.
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