Reflections | How goddess myth gave divine justification to imperial elites

I finally did it. I finally paid a visit to Amaterasu. More than three decades after I had first encountered her in a book of fairy tales for children, and later at university when studying ancient Japanese history – not to mention more than 20 trips to Japan – I have finally visited a shrine, the Atsuta Jingu in Nagoya, where Amaterasu was one of deities worshipped.

The prominence of a female deity in Japan’s national myth might have been a product of the collective memory among ancient mythmakers of a matriarchal society in even earlier, prehistoric times. In Chinese foundation myths, there is also a strong feminine element that is suggestive of an antediluvian matriarchal past.

In line with the nature of myths, there are multiple stories, and multiple versions of the same story, of the origins and deeds of the goddess Nü Wa, chief among which is the narrative of her as humanity’s creator and the saviour of the world. One of the most famous Nü Wa stories is about her creation of human beings out of the loess mud on the banks of the Yellow River. At first, she carefully fashioned men and women by her own hand in her own image. Seeing that this method was taking too much time, she dipped a willow branch in the mud and flung it. Every drop of the splattered mud turned into a human being. The first batch of “handmade” human beings became the rulers and elites while the second batch of “mass-produced” men and women became the common folk. Thus, social stratification was given a divine justification.

In another equally famous tale, the world was devastated by earthquakes, fires and inundations that had been caused by various factors and actors, depending on which version of the tale one refers to. To save the world, Nü Wa performed several miraculous feats, one of which was to create a magic rock that plugged up the hole in the sky through which rain was gushing, thus mitigating the great floods that plagued humankind.

There are many other myths associating with Nü Wa. She supposedly invented musical instruments and the institution of marriage by marrying and procreating with her own brother. The latter was echoed in the story of Amaterasu, who also married her own brother. While she was one of the principal deities in Chinese mythology, Nü Wa never became quite as important to the Chinese as Amaterasu did to the Japanese.