The Story of the Origin of Death

At a Glance

• Central figures: Izanagi, the God of Creation, and Izanami, the Goddess of Creation - the primordial pair who shaped the islands of Japan and its deities.
• Setting: The heavenly realm, the islands of Japan, and Yomi - the underworld of the dead; drawn from Shinto tradition.
• The turn: Izanami dies giving birth to Kagutsuchi, the God of Fire; Izanagi descends into Yomi to reclaim her and breaks his promise not to look at her rotting form.
• The outcome: Izanami remains in Yomi as its ruler and vows to kill one thousand people each day; Izanagi counters with a vow to ensure fifteen hundred births, establishing the cycle of death and life.
• The legacy: Izanami became the Goddess of Death and permanent ruler of Yomi, and the vow exchanged at Yomotsu Hirasaka fixed death as an inescapable part of the world.

Before Izanami died, everything Izanagi and Izanami made lived. They had stirred the primordial sea with the Ame-no-Nuboko, the heavenly jeweled spear, and lifted the first island - Onogoro-shima - dripping from the water. From that island they continued, shaping the great chain of the Japanese islands and calling into being the deities that would inhabit them. Creation moved outward from their joined work, steady and full. Then Izanami gave birth to Kagutsuchi.

Fire was the one thing her body could not hold. The birth consumed her from within, burning her badly enough that even a goddess could not survive it. She sickened, suffered, and died - the first death in a world that had not known death before. The deities that sprang from her vomit and her waste as she lay dying were the last acts of a body still trying to create even as it failed. Izanagi held her and wept, and from his tears more deities were born. It did not help.

The Descent into Yomi

Grief pulls differently at a god than it does at a human. Humans grieve and eventually accept the shape of the new world. Izanagi could not find that shape. He followed Izanami into Yomi.

The underworld was nothing like what they had built together. Where their creation had been bright and generative - islands rising from water, light filling the new sky - Yomi was damp and dark, smelling of rot, lit by nothing. The spirits of the dead moved through it in silence. Izanagi pressed through its twisted passages until he found her.

She was there. He begged her to come back. He told her the world above needed her, that he needed her. Izanami was not unmoved - she said she wished to return. But she had already eaten the food of Yomi, which binds the dead to the underworld, and this was no small thing. She would need to seek permission from Yomi’s rulers before any departure could happen. She made one request of him while she went to ask: do not look at me. Wait in the dark. Do not light anything.

Izanagi waited.

The Comb-Tooth Torch

He did not wait long enough. What moved him - love, or the need to see, or the particular fear that silence in the dark brings - it does not matter now. He broke a tooth from his comb and used it as a torch. The flame was small but sufficient.

What he saw was not Izanami as she had been. Her body had become what bodies become in Yomi - rotting, swollen, crawling. Eight varieties of thunder-deity writhed within her. Maggots covered what had once been the goddess who helped stir the sea into islands.

Izanagi ran.

Izanami’s voice came after him - furious and ashamed. She called out the Yomotsu-shikome, the hideous hag-spirits of the underworld, and sent them to give chase. Demons followed. Izanagi did not look back. He ran through the dark corridors of Yomi throwing down objects behind him - a vine from his hair that became grapes, a comb that became bamboo shoots - anything to slow the pursuit. Even Izanami herself joined the chase, and behind her came the thunder deities she now carried.

The Vow at Yomotsu Hirasaka

He reached the slope of Yomotsu Hirasaka, the boundary where Yomi opens toward the living world. There was a boulder - large enough to seal the passage. Izanagi threw his full strength against it and rolled it across the cave mouth.

They stood on opposite sides of stone. Both of them breathing, if breathing is the right word.

Izanami spoke first.

If you do this, she said, I will kill one thousand people in your land each day.

Izanagi answered her: Then I will ensure that fifteen hundred people are born each day.

Neither of them moved. The boulder held. From that moment the arrangement was fixed - the dead taken by Izanami in her cold domain, the living generated in the world above, the gap between them sealed at Yomotsu Hirasaka by a rock that cannot be moved back. Izanami did not return to the created world. She became its death instead - the ruler of Yomi, the Goddess of Death, bound to that damp and lightless place as surely as she was bound by the food she had eaten there.

Misogi in the Tachibana River

Izanagi emerged into the world feeling contaminated. Yomi’s pollution clung to him. In Shinto understanding, death and decay are sources of ritual impurity, and Izanagi had walked through the center of both. He went to the Tachibana River and performed misogi - the purification rite of washing away defilement in moving water.

As each garment and adornment he cast into the river touched the current, a deity was born from it. When he washed his left eye, Amaterasu came into being - the sun goddess. When he washed his right eye, Tsukuyomi the moon god emerged. When he cleaned his nose, Susanoo the storm god was born. Three of the most consequential deities in all of Shinto tradition, born from the act of washing off the dead.

The river ran on. The impurity passed away downstream. What replaced it was light - the sun goddess shining, the moon god attending the night, the storm god presiding over sea and sky. Izanagi looked at what the washing had produced and assigned each of the three their domains.

What Remained

The islands were still there. The deities Izanagi and Izanami had made together still moved through the created world. The sun continued to cross the sky each day. But Yomi was sealed, and Izanami did not cross back, and the thousand deaths she had promised began arriving, every day, without exception.

Izanagi, it is said, retreated afterward to a small island, to a place of quiet, and remained there. His great work was done - the creation completed before Izanami’s death, and then the harder work completed at Yomotsu Hirasaka, the work of acknowledging that some passages cannot be reversed. The boulder stayed where he had rolled it. On one side of it, fifteen hundred were born. On the other side, a thousand were taken. The slope between the living world and Yomi has never since been empty.