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prayer is addressed to Izanami and the other gods who dwell in the moon, Hirata says that although the Manyô-shiu contains verses about the moon, it was generally considered unlucky to admire it, the reason of which is explained by a verse in the Isemonogatari to be that “man grows old by accumulating moons”; but on the 15th day of the 8th month it is customary to make offerings to the moon, because of her great brilliancy at that season of the year. This however may be a practice derived from the Chinese.
The fourth prayer is addressed to the gods of Isé, namely Amaterasu and Toyo-uke-bime no kami, with a certain number of subordinate deities in adjacent shrines.[1] Toyo-uke-bime was the daughter of Waka-musubi, who was the joint offspring of the god of Fire and the goddess of Soil. She has at least eight other names, all of which express the fact of her being the goddess of food, both vegetable, fish and flesh. Here we meet with a curious Shintô doctrine, according to which a god throws off portions of itself by a process of fissure, thus producing what are called waki-mi-tama, Parted-spirits, with separate functions. Two of the parted spirits of Toyoukebime thus formed are Kukunochi no kami, the producer of all trees, and Kayanu-hime no kami, the parent of all grasses. As rice and other seeds, cattle and the silkworm were produced from the dead body of Toyouke-bime, it is to this goddess and to the action of her ‘parted spirits’ above mentioned that mankind owes the blessings of food, clothing and lodgment. It was an ancient custom therefore to worship this goddess on moving into a new house, built of the wood and thatched with the grass of which she was the first cause. In one of the norito entitled Ohotono hogahi, a service of this kind performed twice annually at the Mikado’s court, this goddess is besought to protect his Palace from harm.
She is also worshipped under the name of Uka-no-mi-
- ↑ A detailed account of the legends relating to these goddesses has already been given in a paper on “The Shrines of Isé” published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Japan.
