E.J. Michael Witzel - The Origins of the Worlds Mythologies

The Origins of the Worlds Mythologies

E.J. Michael Witzel

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Witzel, Michael, 1943
The origins of the worlds mythologies/E.J. Michael Witzel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-536746-1 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-19-981285-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mythology. 2. Myth. I. Title.
BL312.W58 2011
201.3dc22 2010050957

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

For: Yayoi

Manabu

Meimei

Most interesting findings usually result
from hypothesis formation
based on preliminary data analyses.

C. C. RAGIN

On a cold February night in 1990, I rushed down a steep Japanese hill to bring fire to the world of the living. Along with some 2,000 men, all dressed in white and carrying burning torches, I ran down some uneven 500-odd steps to bring fire, Prometheus-like, to the women assembled below in the small town of Shingu in Wakayama Prefecture. This was a men-only affair: that day, women were forbidden to go up to the Kamikura Shrine, where a Shint priest kindled the first fire of the lunar new year and distributed it to us. The towns men, stray acquaintances, whom I had asked for help, were somewhat surprised about the foreigner who wanted to participate. They nevertheless accepted and embraced me warmly, helped me to buy the special clothes and dress up properly, tying the thick straw cord around my waist, getting my taimatsu torch inscribed with traditional good wishes. Like other small groups, loudly greeting each other and clashing our torches, we roamed the town during the afternoon, accepting all-white food like radish and rice from the towns women, who had put up stalls along our path, and fortifying ourselves in various pubs with a lot of rice wineso as to strengthen us for the ordeal. The crowded run downhill, my companions said, was very dangerous: some people break their legs each year. I got away with a little singeing of my ceremonial dress.

The experience was moving: the mad rush downhill in a community of men with the same purpose, and their friendliness toward a stray stranger who had merely dropped in from his sabbatical at Kyoto. Our small group included a number of men who had come home from far away for the ot-matsuri and its rites. Our task of delivering the new fire accomplished, we continued to an all-male bathhouse and on to a private dinner party in one of my new friends houses. Next day, back at the shrine, I interviewed the priest who had performed the churning of the new fire, and he readily answered, even though he was busy with an elaborate private ritual. His counterquestion was whether I had felt pure the evening before.

Then, there was the stirring feeling of participating in an archaic ritual that, people say, had been performed for some 1,400 years, always on the sixth day of the first lunar month. It was like taking part, as a Westerner like me would think, in a pre-Christian ritual that symbolized the bringing of fire by Prometheus (see 3.5.3) and the simultaneous delivery of the sun deity, Amaterasu, from her year-end and primordial rock refuge ( 3.5.1).

By 1990, I had been playing with fire for quite some time: for some 25 years, I had been involved in the study of ancient Indian and Iranian religious and ritual texts, many of which deal with the sacred fire. I had read a lot of the ancient-most Indian mythology found in the Veda, and I had witnessed many Vedic and Buddhist fire rituals during my nearly six years in Nepal in the seventies.

The first, traditional Vedic fire ritual that I saw there was a secluded and secret affair. The agnihotra ritual was carried out by a Brahmin priest whose family had done so for the Nepalese king for the past 200 years. After that first experience I managed to witness many other solemn rituals. Active participation, however, is not allowed for those not born as Hindus. It was deeply moving to see the agnihotra performed exactly as our 3,000-year-old Sanskrit texts tell us. Its priest, living in a compound next to the national temple of Paupatinth just east of Kathmandu, was very friendly and allowed me and even our NTV film crew ready access. The film then helped me greatly in comparing ancient texts and modern performance.

***

However, next to my experience of archaic Indian rituals, I had also read, since my student days, some Japanese texts dealing with the oldest myths and rituals of Japan. For this reason, I was interested in Japanese fire rituals and made an effort to witness a number of them, both Shint and Buddhist, during my yearlong stay in Kyoto.

However, the one at Shingu is special: it is the ritual enactment of an ancient myth, a combination that I had often encountered in Vedic rituals. A month earlier, we had made a tour to Shio no Misaki, the southernmost promontory of the Kii Peninsula, to greet the first sun of our (common calendar) New Year, on January 1. Again, there was a throng of people who had come to watch the first rising of the sun.

During my year at Kyoto, I had many other occasions to see the close interrelation between ancient Japanese myth and current rituals, performed by supposedly irreligious (mushinky) modern citizens. Observing them rekindled my long-standing interest in the oldest Japanese mythological texts of the early eighth century. I was especially interested in the myth of the delivery of the sun (see 5.3.1). It is found in the oldest, originally oral text, the Kojiki, which was written down by imperial order in 712 CE. The myth has a very close resemblance to the Old Vedic one of the delivery of sunlight from a cave of the Dawn, Uas.

I had noticed that correlation a quarter of a century earlier, as a graduate student, but I did not seriously pursue it as I then saw no solution as to the historical relationship between both myths, at least not one according to the methods of philology and historical linguistics that I was trained in. We were used to explanations such as immigration, whereby certain tribes brought their language, religion, and rituals with them. Pouring over ancient Kashmiri birch bark manuscripts and discussing the fine details of the migration process in the seminars of my late teachers Paul Thieme at Tbingen and Karl Hoffmann at Erlangen, and much later F. B. J. Kuiper at Leiden, the pattern of the Aryan migration was foremost in our minds. That means the movement of Indo-Iranian (rya) tribes speaking the language ancestral to both Old Iranian and Vedic, moving southward from the steppes around the Ural Mountains. Even allowing for some migrations from the continent into early Japan, however, the country is very distant from India and Iran, and its language belongs to a completely different linguistic family. A close relationship seemed excluded.