Modern Shinto explains the darkness produced by the Sun-Goddess's retirement as emblematic of the darkness of sin. The renewal of light typifies repentance. Of course, this was far from the thoughts of the original myth-makers.
Susa no wo did not at once proceed to the land of Yomi. He went and begged food of the Food-Goddess, who produced dainty things of all kinds from various parts of her body, and offered them to him. But Susa no wo took offence at her proceedings, which he considered filthy, and at once slew her. Whereupon there were produced in her head silkworms, in her eyes rice, in her ears millet, in her nose small beans, in her genitals barley, and in her fundament large beans. These Musubi, the God of Growth, took and caused to be used as seeds.
The above is the Kojiki version of the story. The Nihongi makes the Moon-God the culprit, and gives it as the reason of his alienation from the Sun-Goddess, who had sent him to visit the Food-Goddess. This is not the only attempt of myth-makers to account for the aloofness maintained by these two deities. The same variant of this episode makes the Sun-Goddess the recipient of the various seeds produced in the body of the Food-Goddess:—
"She was rejoiced, and said, 'These are the things which the race of visible men will eat and live.' So she made the millet, the panic, the wheat and the beans the seed for the dry fields, and the rice she made the seed for the water-fields. Therefore she appointed a Mura-gimi (village-lord) of Heaven, and forthwith sowed for the first time the rice-seed in the narrow fields and in the long fields of Heaven."
Probably in the slaying of the Food-Goddess we have an echo of some of those practices so fully examined by Mr. Frazer, in which the Corn-maiden, or other representative of the corn, is slain—a tragedy of perennial interest to mankind. Witness the rape of Persephone and the death
