Kojiki, Section X: The Purification of the August Person

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.

The purification Izanagi performs, harae, did not stay confined to this one mythic episode. It became, and remains, one of the central ritual acts of Shinto practice, performed today at shrine entrances through hand and mouth rinsing, and in fuller form by priests using water, salt or a waved paper wand before festivals, before entering sacred precincts, and after events regarded as sources of pollution such as death or serious illness. The myth supplies the ritual with its founding logic rather than merely decorating it, since Izanagi's own washing establishes that contact with death defiles even a deity and that the remedy is not punishment or atonement but cleansing through water. That logic runs through the annual Oharae rites held at shrines nationwide each June and December, which use the same basic vocabulary of purification the Kojiki attributes to Izanagi at Tachibana. The birth of Amaterasu from this act also gives the imperial line, which traditional accounts trace to her, an origin bound up with purification rather than conquest or creation from nothing, a detail later Shinto thought returned to repeatedly when explaining why ritual purity carries the theological weight it does across so many otherwise unrelated observances.