Japanese
This descent story is traditional in that the hero is in search of his beloved. In keeping with the Orpheus tradition, the quest, for ritualistic reasons, is unsuccessful. The struggle, too, is traditional but for the fact that the combatants are the former lovers.
Izanami continued producing a variety of divinities: the sea, the waves, the mountains, and so on, until finally she brought forth the god of Fire.
The private parts of the August Female were so burned in giving birth to this last divinity, that she mortally sickened, and various other divinities came into existence from her vomit (mountains), her offal (mud), and her 5 urine. At last she dies. Izanagi is sick with rage and despair, and as he creeps around her pillow, lamenting, still other divinities spring into existence from his tears. Then he seizes his sword, ten handbreadths long, and cuts off his son’s (the Fire god) head; from the blood are born still more deities. lo
At this point begins one of the most striking sequences in the story. Izanagi, unable to contain his desire to see his dead sister wife, decides to visit her in the Land of Darkness. There she has built a castle. Izanagi tries to entice her back to the upper world where their creative work is still unfinished. But she hesitates, saying it is too late, for she has eaten the is
Food of the Land of Darkness. She bids her brother not to look upon her and retires into her palace. But Izanagi is impatient. He breaks off the left end-tooth of his comb, ignites it, and enters to discover why she tarries so long. He finds her in a shocking condition of disintegration, covered with maggots, putrescent, and rotting. Frightened at the sight, he turns and 20 flees. But his sister, angry at being discovered in such a shameful state, launches the hags (shikome) of the Land of Darkness in his pursuit. As he flees Izanagi takes his headdress and throws it behind him; it immediately turns into grapes, which the hags stop to devour. But the pursuit resumes, and Izanagi snatches from his hair the right comb, which he casts behind u him; it immediately turns into bamboo sprouts, which the hags also tear up and eat. Izanami then sends an army of fifteen hundred warriors on her brother’s traces. However, the August Male keeps them at a distance by brandishing his ten-grasp sword. Finally, at the Even Pass between the world of light and the Land of Darkness, he finds three peaches with which so he pelts his pursuers so that they are obliged to retreat. Without further ado
He blocks the Even Pass with a great rock, from either side of which he and his sister address each other menacingly. She threatens to kill a thousand beings a day in the land of light, to which Izanagi replies that in such a case he will set up fifteen hundred parturition houses, that is, he will cause fifteen hundred births each day, thereby establishing a just proportion between births and deaths. He further severs connection with his sister by pronouncing the formula of divorce.
(S. N. Kramer, ed., Mythologies of the Ancient World, pp. 419-420.)
World History
