Sacred Waters

The August 3^rd issue of Jinja Shinpō was the special summer issue, which has twice as many pages as usual. Much of the space is taken up by the names of jinja, because they pay to have their name appear in this issue (and the New Year issue). Another distinctive feature of this issue is that the front and back pages are printed in colour, and taken up with what could be called a photo essay. The theme this time was sacred waters.

The front page was a picture of Ama-no-Manai (天の真名井, True Well of the Heavens) at Kono Jinja (籠神社) in northern Kyoto Prefecture. Kono Jinja is probably the most important jinja you have never heard of. It is supposed to be the place where Toyo’ukë Ōmikami was enshrined before she was moved to the Outer Sanctuary at Isë Jingū, and Amaterasu Ōmikami is also said to have been enshrined there for a few years while looking for a permanent home. That makes it the only place other than Isë where the two kami were enshrined together, and so it calls itself “Moto Isë”, which means “Earlier Isë”. The priestly family, the Amabë (海部), are one of the handful with a lineage reliably documented for over a thousand years, and it was the Ichi-no-Miya of the ancient province in which it is situated.

Ama-no-Manai is a well that is said to have been brought down from Takamanohara (高天原, “The High Plain of the Heavens”), and then taken to Isë, where it still serves as the source of water for the offerings made every day to the kami. Of course, it is still at Kono Jinja too, and anyway how do you move a well? This is not the only occurrence of this motif in Japanese myth, but I confess to not being entirely sure what is supposed to be happening.

The back page has five examples on, so I will not write about them all.

The first one is Izumi Jinja (泉神社), in Ibaraki Prefecture. This jinja has a pool of clear water fed by a spring, and this is what the jinja is named after, as “izumi” means “spring” in this sense (not the season, or the coiled bit of metal). According to the jinja’s records, a “spiritual jewel” (reitama, 霊玉) fell from the heavens here in ancient times, and the spring welled up. The jewel itself was enshrined as the vessel of the kami of the spring, who was called Ama-no-Hayatama-Himë (天速玉姫). This pool is recorded in the eighth-century Hitachi-no-Kuni Fudoki as a place where men and women gathered to eat, drink, and relax, and the jinja itself is recorded in the tenth-century Engishiki.

The last is Iwato Jinja (岩戸神社) in Nagasaki Prefecture. This jinja does not appear to have a homepage, but one of the local tourist boards has a simple page with some nice photographs of it. The vessel for the kami here is a cave, which is said to have been inhabited by the Jōmon people, the culture who inhabited Japan from about 30,000 years ago until rice agriculture was introduced from the continent very roughly 2,000 years ago (the dates keep getting pushed back by new discoveries, so maybe nearer 2,500 years ago). Next to the cave, a waterfall bursts from the rock, and this is the source of the river that flows through the local town.

Sacred waters are a bit less common in Shinto than sacred trees or sacred rocks, but they are an important part of the tradition.