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Born From a Father's Purifying Bath

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Born From a Father's Purifying Bath

Section ten of the Kojiki recounts the ritual purification Izanagi performs after returning from the land of Yomi, the world of the dead, where he had gone to retrieve his wife Izanami and had instead seen her decayed body. Fleeing in horror and sealing the passage between the two worlds, Izanagi resolves to cleanse himself of the pollution he carried back with him and bathes in a river at Tachibana. As he washes each part of his body, deities are born directly from the act of washing itself, and when he washes his left eye, his right eye and his nose in turn, three of the most consequential deities in the text emerge: Amaterasu, the sun deity, from the left eye, Tsukuyomi, a deity of the moon, from the right eye, and Susanoo, a storm deity, from the nose. Izanagi then divides rule among the three, giving Amaterasu the plain of high heaven, Tsukuyomi the realm of night, and Susanoo the sea, establishing the divine order that the rest of the Kojiki's early chapters build upon. Earlier acts of washing in the same passage produce lesser deities of pollution and purification in turn, so the three siblings arrive as the sequence's culmination rather than its only result, each item Izanagi removes and each part of his body he rinses giving rise to yet another named deity before the sequence reaches its climax with the three siblings.

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Sources
The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters
Basil Hall Chamberlain, Asiatic Society of Japan / Internet Sacred Text Archive, 1919Izanagis purification at Tachibana and the birth of Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi and SusanooView the Source
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