That night the ghost of Shiro appeared once again in a dream, and advised Hana Saka Jijii to collect the ashes of the burnt mortar and scatter them on withered trees. Next morning he did as the dog advised him. To his astonishment he found that the ashes caused withered trees to come to life and send forth fresh and beautiful blossoms. He then went about the country and employed himself reviving dead plum and cherry trees, and soon became so renowned that a prince sent for him, asking that he should bring back to life the withered trees in his garden. The old man received a rich reward when he accomplished the feat.
The jealous neighbour came to know how Hana Saka Jijii revived dead trees, so he collected what remained of the ashes of the pine-tree mortar. Then he set forth to proclaim to the inhabitants of a royal town that he could work the same miracle as Hana Saka Jijii. The prince sent for him, and the man climbed into the branches of a withered tree. But when he scattered the ashes no bud or blossom appeared, and the wind blew the dust into the eyes of the prince and nearly blinded him. The [[170]]impostor was seized and soundly beaten; and the dog Shiro was, in this manner, well avenged.
In this story the dog is a searcher for and giver of treasure. It is of special interest, therefore, to find that Artemis, the mugwort-goddess of the West, “was not only the opener of treasure-houses, but she also possessed the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone; she could transmute base substances into gold”. She could therefore grant riches to those whom she favoured. Dr. Rendel Harris, quoting from an old English writer, records the belief “that upon St. John’s eve there are coals (which turn to gold) to be found at midday under the roots of mugwort, which after or before that time are very small, or none at all”. The gold cures sickness.[10]
A similar belief was attached to the mandrake. A French story tells of a peasant who regularly “fed” a mandrake that grew below a mistletoe-bearing oak. The mandrake, when fed, would, it was believed, “make you rich by returning twice as much as you spent upon it.… The plant had become an animal.”[11]
If Shiro’s prototype was the mandrake-dog which sacrificed itself for the sake of lovers, and was itself an “avatar” of the deity, we should expect to find the pine tree connected with the love-goddess.[12] Joly, in his Legend in Japanese Art (p. 147), tells that “at Takasago there is a very old pine tree, the trunk of which is bifurcated; in it dwells the spirit of the Maiden of Takasago, who was seen once by the son of Izanagi, who fell in love and wedded her. Both lived to a very great age, dying at the same hour on the same day, and since [[171]]then their spirits abide in the tree, but on moonlight nights they return to human shape and revisit the scene of their earthly life and pursue their work of gathering pine needles.” The needles were promoters of longevity, as we have seen.
Another Japanese pair associated with the pine trees are Jo and Uba, a couple of old and wrinkled spirits. They gathered pine needles, Jo using a rake and Uba a besom and fan.
The goddess of the pine was evidently a Far Eastern Aphrodite, as well as a Far Eastern Artemis—an Artemis who provided medicine for women in the form of the mugwort, was a goddess of birth, a guardian of treasure, and a goddess of travellers and hunters. The Romans associated with Diana (Artemis) her loved one, Dianus or Janus,[13] as the tree-goddess in Japan was associated with a deified human lover.
The pine may have been “a kind of mugwort” (and apparently, like the cypress, a “kind of mandrake”), but it did not displace the mugwort as a medicinal plant. Dr. Rendel Harris quotes a letter from Professor Giles, the distinguished Chinese scholar, who says: “There is quite a literature about Artemisia vulgaris, L. (the mugwort), which has been used in China from time immemorial for cauterizing as a counter-irritant, especially in cases of gout. Other species of Artemisia are also found in China.”[14]
The Far Eastern Artemis appears to be represented by the immortal lady known in China as Ho Sien Ku, and in Japan as Kasenko. She is shown “as a young woman clothed in mugwort, holding a lotus stem and flower” (like a western Asiatic or Egyptian goddess), “and talking to a phœnix”, or “depicted carrying a [[172]]basket of loquat fruits which she gathered for her sick mother. She was a woman who, having been promised immortality in a dream, fed on mother-of-pearl, and thereafter moved as swiftly as a bird.”[15] The Mexican god Tlaloc’s wife was similarly a mugwort goddess.
In the pine-tree story the Japanese representative of the tree- and lunar-goddess of love appears with her spouse on moonlight nights. The moon was the “Pearl of Heaven”. It will be noted that the mugwort is connected with pearl-shell—the lady Ho Sien Ku having acquired the right to wear mugwort, in her character as an immortal, by eating mother-of-pearl. This connection of pearl-shell with a medicinal plant is a more arbitrary one than that of the mugwort with the pine, or the mandrake with the cypress.