The Cult of Izanami: The Grave in the Cliff at Hana no Iwaya

Izanami is not worshipped only in myth. The Nihon Shoki records that she was buried at Arima in the province of Kumano after dying from the burns of bearing the fire god Kagutsuchi, and that burial site is identified today with Hana no Iwaya, a shrine on the Kii Peninsula's Shichiri-mihama coast, part of the Kii Mountains World Heritage area. The shrine keeps an unusually old form of Shinto worship: it has no main hall, because the goshintai, the object housing the deity, is the cliff face itself, a towering rock formation that ancient practice treated the way it treated notable trees, boulders and waterfalls, as a place a kami inhabits directly rather than a site built to represent one. Worshippers pray from an enclosure set before the rock rather than inside any building. Twice a year, on the second of February and the second of October, the shrine holds the O-Tsunakake-Shinji festival, stringing a great rope from the cliff associated with Izanami across to a smaller rock read as her son Kagutsuchi, a rite local tradition frames as tending the bond between mother and the child whose birth killed her. Local prayer for her soul, offered with seasonal flowers, song and dance, is recorded continuing at the site into the present. Izanami's cult is therefore genuinely active rather than confined to the mythic record, though it is narrow and geographically specific: a single ancient shrine on the coast where tradition places her grave, rather than a network of temples spread across Japan the way Amaterasu's cult is.