Izanagi and Izanami

Region/Culture: Japan; the Shinto tradition
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: The primordial divine couple who churned the first dry land out of the sea and then gave birth to the islands of Japan and the host of kami.
Role in Mythos: They are the creator gods of Shinto cosmogony, whose marriage, bereavement, and bitter separation set death, ritual purification, and the great heavenly deities into motion.
Relation to Humans: As makers of the land itself, they stand at the root of the Japanese islands and of the imperial line, which traced its descent from their daughter, the sun goddess Amaterasu. Their parting also fixed the terms of mortal existence, the daily reckoning of a thousand deaths weighed against fifteen hundred births.

They stood on the floating bridge of heaven and looked down at a sea with no shore. Below them the world was oil and drift, brine turning slowly on itself, jellyfish carried this way and that because there was nothing solid for anything to hold. The elder gods had put a spear into their hands, its long shaft ringed near the point with jewels, and had told them to make the churn beneath into something a foot could stand on. Izanagi lowered the spear and stirred the water until it thickened, and when he drew the point back up, brine ran down the shaft and gathered and fell. Each drop hardened as it dropped. One struck the surface and did not sink, and then it piled, salt on salt, into an island. They named it Onogoro, the land that congealed of itself, and they climbed down to live on the thing they had made.

On the island they raised a single tall pillar and built a wide hall around it, and then they set about the plainest and strangest work a god can be given, which is to work out from nothing how two bodies join. They agreed to walk around the pillar in opposite directions and meet on the far side. When they came face to face Izanami spoke first, glad of him, and called him a fine young man, and he answered that she was a lovely girl. The words felt right and the child came wrong. Their firstborn had no bones, a soft boneless thing they named Hiruko, the leech-child, and they laid it in a boat of reeds and let the current take it out of the story. The heavenly gods, asked what had gone amiss, gave a flat answer: the woman had spoken first. So the couple circled the pillar again, and this time Izanagi spoke before her, and after that their union held.

What came then was the world. Island after island dropped from them, the whole crooked chain of Japan, and after the land came its gods, the kami of wind and mountains and rivers and trees, until the young world was thick with divinity. Then Izanami bore fire. The birth of Kagutsuchi, the fire god, burned her from the inside, and she sickened and could not rise. Even her suffering was fertile; more kami came out of her as she lay dying. But she died, and passed into Yomi, the shadowed land of the dead, and Izanagi was left holding grief he did not know a god could feel. He drew his sword and struck the head from the infant fire, and blood flew off the blade and became more gods still, so that even his rage made new things. It did not bring her back.

He went after her. Down into Yomi he walked, into a dark that smelled of rot, and at the sealed door of the underworld hall she came to speak with him. Come home, he said. She told him she would ask the gods of that country, because she had already eaten at its hearth and might be bound to it, and she asked one thing of him: wait here, and do not look at me. He waited in the black, and the waiting stretched, and at last he could not stand it. He broke a tooth from the wooden comb in his hair and set it alight for a single flame, and he looked. She was a ruin. Maggots seethed in her flesh and eight thunder-spirits crouched in the rot of her body, and the beautiful goddess who had named him on Onogoro was gone. He should not have looked.

He ran. Shamed and furious at being seen, Izanami loosed the hags of Yomi after him, then the thunder-gods, then a whole army of the dead. He flung down the vine that bound his hair and it sprouted into grapes, and the pursuers stopped to eat; he threw the teeth of his comb and they became bamboo shoots, and again they stopped. At the pass called Yomotsu Hirasaka, the slope between the living and the dead, he found three peaches and hurled them, and the horde broke and fled. Last of all Izanami herself came climbing after him, and there he set his shoulder to a boulder that a thousand men could not have moved and rolled it across the mouth of the slope. Through the stone they said their parting. She swore that she would strangle a thousand of the living every day. He answered that he would raise fifteen hundred birthing-huts every day. That is the ledger the world has run on ever since.

He came up filthy with death, and to be clean of it he went to a river in Tsukushi and bathed. As he washed, gods streamed off him with the grime. From his left eye came Amaterasu, the sun; from his right eye Tsukuyomi, the moon; from his nose the storm god Susanoo. Izanagi looked at the three shining children born from his own cleansing and was glad, and he gave the high heavens to the sun, the night to the moon, and the seas to the storm, and then he stepped out of the tale he had begun. His power and hers was generation, the sheer making of land and gods out of salt water and their own bodies, and the limit on that power was the same law it wrote: what enters the dark and eats there stays there, and no torch and no love can carry it back.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are Izanagi and Izanami?

Izanagi and Izanami are the primordial creator deities of Japanese Shinto mythology, a divine husband and wife whose names mean roughly “he who invites” and “she who invites.” Standing on the floating bridge of heaven, they churned the first island out of the sea and then gave birth to the islands of Japan and to many of the Shinto gods, or kami.

What did Izanagi and Izanami create?

Izanagi and Izanami created the Japanese archipelago and a large number of kami. Using a jewelled spear, they first formed the island of Onogoro, then produced the chain of Japanese islands, followed by gods of the wind, mountains, rivers, trees, and fire. Their daughter Amaterasu became the sun goddess from whom Japan’s imperial line claimed descent.

How did Izanami die?

Izanami died giving birth to Kagutsuchi, the fire god, whose flames burned her fatally. She then passed into Yomi, the Japanese land of the dead. Her grief-stricken husband Izanagi beheaded the infant fire god with his sword, and still more kami were born from the spilled blood.

What happened when Izanagi went to the underworld?

Izanagi followed Izanami into Yomi to bring her back, but she warned him not to look at her while she asked the underworld’s gods to release her. He lit a comb-tooth as a torch and looked anyway, finding her a rotting corpse infested with maggots and thunder-spirits. He fled in horror, and at the slope of Yomotsu Hirasaka he sealed the entrance with a giant boulder, after which the two swore their divorce.

Which gods were born from Izanagi?

After escaping Yomi, Izanagi purified himself in a river, and three of the most important Shinto deities were born from the act of washing. Amaterasu the sun goddess came from his left eye, Tsukuyomi the moon deity from his right eye, and Susanoo the storm god from his nose. Izanagi then assigned the heavens, the night, and the seas to the three.