Miwa-yama Snake-deity Marriage

The Miwa-yama snake-deity marriage is recorded in the central scroll of the Kojiki (712 CE) and the Sujin chapter of the Nihon Shoki (720 CE) as a marriage tale in which Omononushi-no-Kami visits a mortal woman and is revealed to be a snake. The Kojiki (Sujin section) says that a handsome man came nightly to Ikutamayori-bime, who became pregnant. Suspicious, her parents told her to pass a hemp thread through the hem of his robe with a needle. The next morning, following the thread, they found that it led to the shrine on Mount Mimoro, revealing the man to be Omononushi-no-Kami. The remainder of the thread was three coils (mi-wa) only, the source of the place-name Miwa. The Nihon Shoki Sujin chapter records a separate marriage between Yamato-toto-hi-momoso-hime-no-Mikoto and Omononushi: when the princess wished to see the deity, she saw him as a small snake and was startled; ashamed, he departed, and she killed herself and was buried at Hashihaka. The structure has three parts: the night visitor and the pregnancy; the tracking of the thread and the revelation of the deity's identity; and the origin-of-the-place-name explanation. As a representative god-and-mortal (ishuikon) marriage, this is the oldest example of the odamaki (thread-spool) folk-tale type. The Yamato-toto-hi-momoso-hime account combines the 'do not look' taboo with the origin story of the Hashihaka tomb. Omononushi-no-Kami is the principal deity of Omiwa Jinja, which has no main hall and worships Mount Miwa as its sacred body, the surviving form of an archaic mode of worship. The site is Mount Miwa (467 m) in Miwa, Sakurai (Nara). Omiwa Jinja, whose name appears in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, is one of the oldest shrines in Japan and preserves into the present the ancient form of worship of the mountain itself. The Hashihaka tomb (Hashinaka, Sakurai, designated by the Imperial Household Agency as the tomb of Yamato-toto-hi-momoso-hime-no-Mikoto) is among the oldest large keyhole tombs; recent archaeology has proposed an identification with the tomb of Himiko. Sub-shrines including Sai Jinja and Hibara Jinja gather in the surrounding area. Sources include the central scroll of the Kojiki, Sujin chapter (712 CE), and the Sujin 10 entry of the Nihon Shoki (720 CE). The Nihon Shoki preserves a variant featuring Yamato-toto-hi-momoso-hime-no-Mikoto. Related accounts of Omononushi appear in the Izumo no Kuni Fudoki and the Harima no Kuni Fudoki; commentary includes Motoori Norinaga's Kojiki-den and modern studies of Mount Miwa worship (Umehara Takeshi and others).