The Legend of Izanagi’s Purification
At a Glance
- Central figures: Izanagi, God of Life and co-creator of Japan, and his dead wife Izanami, Goddess of Creation and Death; also Amaterasu (sun goddess), Tsukuyomi (moon god), and Susanoo (storm god), who are born from Izanagi’s act of purification.
- Setting: The land of Yomi (the Shinto underworld) and the Ame-no-Yasu River; the story belongs to the foundational Shinto creation tradition.
- The turn: Izanagi descends to Yomi to recover Izanami, breaks his promise by looking at her decaying body, and flees back to the living world carrying the pollution of death.
- The outcome: Izanagi performs misogi - ritual purification by bathing in the Ame-no-Yasu River - washing away the defilement of Yomi and giving birth to Amaterasu from his left eye, Tsukuyomi from his right eye, and Susanoo from his nose.
- The legacy: The purification established misogi as a central Shinto ritual, still observed at shrines where worshippers wash hands and mouth before approaching the divine.
Izanami died in childbirth. The fire god Kagu-tsuchi burned her as he entered the world, and grief drove Izanagi down into Yomi.
He knew the realm he was entering. He and Izanami had made the world together - had stirred the sea with the jeweled spear, raised the islands of Japan from the brine, filled the heavens and the land with gods. None of that could bring her back. He went anyway.
Into Yomi
Yomi was dark and without color, the inverse of everything Izanagi and Izanami had shaped together. He found her there in the shadows.
She had already eaten the food of the dead. This is how Yomi works: the food binds you to the realm, makes you part of it. She could not simply walk back out with him. She would have to plead with the gods of that place, she told him, and it might be possible - but while she did, he must not look at her.
He agreed.
He waited.
The silence of Yomi is not the silence of a forest or a shrine at dawn. It presses. Izanagi held his torch and did not move and tried not to think about what lay in the dark around him. He thought about her face. He thought about the islands they had stood on together, watching the first light reach across water they had made.
He broke the twig from his comb and lit it.
What he saw was not Izanami. It was a body that had rotted in the dark - maggots moving in the flesh, eight thunder deities crouched in the cavities of what had been her. He turned and ran.
The Hags of Yomi and the Great Boulder
Izanami’s voice came after him, humiliated and furious. She sent the Yomotsu-shikome - the hags of Yomi, her pursuers - into the passages behind him.
He ran. He threw his black headdress behind him and it became a bunch of grapes; while the hags stopped to eat, he ran further. He tore his comb and threw it, and bamboo shoots sprang up behind him and slowed them again. He reached the slope that led back to the world of the living, grabbed three peaches growing there, and hurled them back. The hags retreated.
Izanami herself came then. He sealed the entrance to Yomi with a great boulder - a stone that a thousand men could not move. They stood on opposite sides of it. Through or around the rock, Izanami’s voice reached him: she would kill a thousand people every day. His voice answered her: then a thousand five hundred would be born to replace them. The division between the living and the dead was made permanent, sealed in those words, fixed in place by that stone.
The Weight He Carried Back
He was free. He was alive. He was contaminated.
Kegare - the pollution that accrues from contact with death and decay - was not a metaphor in Shinto understanding. Izanagi had walked through Yomi, had seen its darkness, had looked on what death does to a body. He had carried that world on his skin all the way to the surface. It could not simply be left at the boundary. It had to be washed out of him.
He made his way to the Ame-no-Yasu River and walked into the water.
Misogi at the Ame-no-Yasu River
He stripped off his clothing as he waded in. Each item he removed - the jewels, the garments, the accessories he had worn into the underworld - fell into the current and became a deity. Twelve gods rose from what he shed. The river received them.
He submerged himself.
From his left eye when he surfaced: Amaterasu, the sun goddess, light returning to the world in the shape of a person. From his right eye: Tsukuyomi, the moon god, the one who would govern the cycles of night. From his nose: Susanoo, the storm god, the unruly one, already restless.
Izanagi called these three the mihashira no uzu no miko - the Three Precious Children. He assigned them their domains. Amaterasu would rule Takamagahara, the Plain of Heaven. Tsukuyomi would govern the realm of night. Susanoo would rule the seas.
The river continued to move around him. More gods rose from the purification - deities of water and current and the liminal places where rivers meet the sea. The act of cleansing had become an act of creation. What Yomi had polluted, the river remade.
What the River Left Behind
Misogi is still practiced. At the entrance to a Shinto shrine, the stone basin - the temizuya - holds water for washing hands and mouth before approaching the inner sanctuary. The movement is not complicated: ladle the water, rinse the left hand, rinse the right, cup water to rinse the mouth, set the ladle down clean. What the gesture carries is the memory of Izanagi standing in the Ame-no-Yasu River, washing Yomi off his skin while three gods opened their eyes for the first time.
The sun came out of that water. The moon came out of it. The storms that rake the Japanese archipelago - Susanoo’s inheritance - came out of it. The separation of the living from the dead had been terrible, had cost Izanagi the wife with whom he made the world. But the river at the boundary of that loss gave back something the underworld could not take: the particular light that falls on a shrine in the early morning, the particular cold of mountain water on clean hands.