Note 43 — Chapter XVII · Culture Mixing in Japan

Old Shinto was concerned chiefly with the food-supply, with child-getting, with the preservation of health, and protection against calamities caused by floods, droughts, fire, or earthquakes. It has little or nothing to say regarding the doctrine of immortality. There was no heaven and no hell. The spirits of some of these deities who died like ordinary mortals went to the land of Yomi, as did also the spirit of the Mikado, but little is told regarding the mysterious Otherworld in which dwelt the spirits of disease and death. “In one passage of the Nihon-gi,” says Aston,43 “Yomi is clearly no more than a metaphor for the grave.” It thus resembled the dark Otherworld or Underworld of the Babylonians, from which Gilgamesh summoned the spirit of his dead friend, Ea-bani.44 No spirit of a god could escape from Yomi after eating “the food of the dead”. When the Babylonian god Adapa, son of Ea, was summoned to appear in the Otherworld, his father warned him not to accept of the water and food which would be offered him.45 The goddess Ishtar was struck with disease when she entered Hades in quest of her lover, the god Tammuz, and it was not until she had been sprinkled with the “water of life” that she was healed and liberated.46