Issue 109 of The Imperial Family (皇室) had an article about the Betsugū at Isë Jingū. The Betsugū are the most important jinja under the two main sanctuaries (the Inner and Outer), and there are fourteen of them: ten associated with the Inner Sanctuary, and four with the Outer. The article was mainly about the two that are furthest from the main sanctuaries, about 17 and 40 kilometres, but there was an interesting page about the origins of these jinja.
The earliest surviving document from Jingū, from 804, lists five at the Inner Sanctuary and one at the Outer. Those at the Inner Sanctuary were Aramatsuri-no-miya, Tsukiyomi-no-miya, Takihara-no-miya, Takiharanarabi-no-miya, and Isawa-no-miya. Aramatsuri-no-miya enshrines the aramitama of Amaterasu Ōmikami. At this point, Tsukiyomi-no-miya enshrined Tsukiyomi, his aramitama, Izanagi, and Izanami. The other three all enshrined Amaterasu Ōmikami. Takiharanarabi-no-miya is next to Takihara-no-miya, and its name means “The Sanctuary Next To Takihara-no-miya”. I am sure that there is something important we do not know about that situation. (There are quite a few jinja in Jingū called, roughly, “Jinja in front of [name of other jinja]”, and in some cases we do not even know which kami are enshrined there.)
Within a century or so of this, Izanagi and Izanami were moved out of Tsukiyomi-no-miya into their own jinja, which was called Izanagi-no-miya. A couple of centuries after that, in the late eleventh century, the jinja enshrining the kami of the land on which the Outer Sanctuary was built was promoted to a Betsugū, called Tsuchi-no-miya (“Sanctuary of the Soil”). And within another century, a jinja associated with the Outer Sanctuary enshrining Tsukiyomi was promoted to Betsugū as Tsukiyomi-no-miya.
At the end of the thirteenth century, the attempted Mongol invasions of Japan were thwarted by divine winds (“kamikazë”), and the jinja at both sanctuaries that enshrined wind kami were promoted to Betsugū: Kazahinomi-no-miya (“Sanctuary of the Prayers of the Day of the Wind”) at the Inner Sanctuary, and Kazë-no-miya (“Sanctuary of the Wind”) at the Outer.
In 1873, Izanami and the aramitama of Tsukiyomi were given their own Betsugū at the Inner Sanctuary, Tsukiyomiaramitama-no-miya and Izanami-no-miya. (The names are the sensible way around. That is not absolutely guaranteed in Shinto.)
Finally, in 1923, a jinja enshrining Yamatohimë-no-mikoto, who is supposed to have brought Amaterasu Ōmikami to Isë and served as the first priestess, was created and made a Betsugū of the Inner Sanctuary.
Before reading this article, I did not know about the splitting of the original Inner Sanctuary Tsukiyomi-no-miya, nor that two other Outer Sanctuary Betsugū were more recent. (The wind kami situation is often mentioned, and the centenary of Yamatohimë-no-miya was three years ago, so I heard a lot about it then.) There is a tendency to think of places like Jingū as being unchanged since time immemorial, but that is far from being the case. Still, looking at the frequency, we are not due another Betsugū for at least a century, so this list should be reliable for a while yet.
I love the historical implications in these shrine names, presumably there was a reason “shrine next to Takihara-no-miya” was built, but the kami are more ancient than our history can handle.
Also, does this mean that both the Inner and Outer Shrine have a Betsugu named Tsukiyomi-no-miya? I know there are still 4 shrines in the Inner Sanctuary’s Tsukiyomi Betsugu but if Izanagi and Izanami were moved…
They do, although they use different kanji. (“Moon Reading” at the Inner Sanctuary and “Moon Night Seeing” at the Outer.) I do not know why, and I assume that the kami have always been thought to be the same — and that that was part of the reason why the Outer Sanctuary jinja got promoted.
I was very interested to learn that after the Mongol invasions the jinja that wind kami were promoted to Betsugū. In my studies of the Hachiman cult I of course learned that the kami was regarded as having been responsible for the divine wind that defeated the Mongols. Thomas Conlan published a book “In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Takezaki Suenaga’s Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan, Translation with Interpretive Essay by Thomas D. Conlan” in 2001, suggesting broadly that the Japanese military were capable of repelling the invasion without divine aid. He states that “He notes that the latter, especially, [kamikaze and shinkoku] was a belief that was limited to “a small coterie of courtiers and priests throughout the thirteenth century.” However, even Conlan acknowledges that Takezaki and his contemporaries naturally believed the battles had been won with the aid of the gods.
This evidence from Ise shows that the belief in divine winds were perhaps more generally held across Japan than Conlan accounts for.
The social spread of a belief is always difficult to determine in pre-modern times, when all our written sources come from the elite. I have seen the suggestion that the reason we find self-conscious development of “Shinto” in the thirteenth century, and no earlier, is that this is when Buddhism moved beyond being limited to “a small coterie of courtiers and priests”, and Shinto priests finally thought that they had to do something.
I strongly suspect that the belief in protection from the kami was quite widespread. I would also expect quite a lot of variation in detail…