Kami Who Have Sex

Content warning: See the title…

A book I have read recently is Maguwau Kamigami (まぐわう神々), by Kanzaki Noritakë (神崎宣武). The title can be translated as “Kami Who Have Sex”, and it is about explicitly sexual elements in Shinto practice.

The first thing to note is that Kanzaki is a Shinto priest and ethnologist, and has a regular column in Jinja Shinpō. His new books invariably get a positive review in the newspaper. But not this one. This one was passed over in silence.

The executive summary is that explicitly sexual associations with kami can be traced back centuries, but they always seem to have been somewhat marginal. After the explicit mentions in the earliest myths, clearly sexual elements seem to disappear from all the evidence we have concerning central and prestigious jinja and matsuri. (This is an argument from silence — Kanzaki does not mention any.)

One of the major forms in which such elements are found are dōsojin (道祖神), which are images of kami that were set up at road junctions or at the roadside at the borders of villages, and served to protect travellers and the boundary. In certain areas of Japan — around Tokyo — these often took the form of a stone with an image of a man and woman on, and sometimes they are embracing, or kissing, or even having sex. The surviving examples are all 400 years old or less, but that may well be just a result of increasing prosperity making it possible for ordinary people to afford carved stones. Older wooden images would not have survived.

There are also a fair number of connections between harvest ceremonies and clearly sexual elements, such as sacred dance costumes that include large wooden penises, or jinja where the goshintai is visible, and is a large carving of a penis — or a vulva, or sometimes both, but penises seem to be much more common. Kanzaki argues that the two common prayers of premodern peasants were good harvests and healthy children, and that it is not surprising that the two got merged in a lot of cases.

At some of the sites with penis kami, there is evidence for people coming to pray for relief from STDs, particularly syphilis. Japan has never had a particularly strict attitude to sexual activity, and it was even less so in the Edo period, so when syphilis arrived in the sixteenth century (I blame the Portuguese), it spread widely. There was no effective treatment at the time, so people just prayed. This was particularly true for women working in the pleasure quarters, where having sex with customers was part of the job (but, importantly, only part). There are several surviving sites that seem to have been particularly associated with those areas.

When Westerners were allowed into the country around 1860, they thought all of this was primitive and disgusting, so the Meiji government passed laws to suppress it, and actually enforced them quite strictly in areas foreigners were likely to visit. Mountain villages in western Japan were not such a concern. However, this does seem to have led to a lot of the customs being discontinued. Some do survive, and now are major tourist attractions — because it is a religious festival in which people solemnly parade a two-metre penis through the village.

My impression on reading the book is that Kanzaki finds the evidence unsatisfactory. There is enough to make it clear that this sort of thing happened, in a lot of places, but not enough to attempt any sort of general classification, or even to say whether the survivors are typical examples that were lucky, or survived because they were always remarkable. At any rate, Jinja Honchō does not draw attention to these elements of Shinto’s past. Or even present.