(Compare with Japanese type, page [338])
Okikurumi is said to have worn ear-rings. He had [[329]]therefore a solar connection. The Aryo-Indian hero, Karna, son of Surya, the sun-god, who emerged from an ear of his human mother, Princess Pritha, was similarly adorned at birth with ear-rings. The Ainu have from the earliest times considered it essential that they should all wear ear-rings, and the ears of males and females are bored in childhood. It was similarly a ceremonial practice in ancient Peru to bore the ears of Inca princes. Jacob objected to his wives wearing ear-rings, and buried those so-called “ornaments” with the gods of Laban under an oak at Shechem.[12] Bracelets and “ear-ornaments” were similarly favoured as religious charms and symbols by the Ainu.
It is of special interest to note that mummification was practised by some Ainu tribes or families. Whether or not they acquired this custom from the Koro-pok-guru is uncertain. Women tattooed their arms, their upper and lower lips, and sometimes their foreheads. Tattooing and mummification similarly obtained among the Aleutian Islanders. The same peculiar methods of preserving corpses obtained among the Ainu, the Aleutians, and certain Red Indian tribes of North America.[13] Another link between the Old and New Worlds is afforded by American-Asiatic bone plate armour.[14]
Like the Ostiaks and other Siberian tribes, the Ainu worship the bear. Their bear feasts are occasions for heavy drinking and much dancing and singing. Drunkenness is to them “supreme bliss”.
The bear-goddess was the wife of the dragon-god. She had a human lover, and that is why bears, her descendants, “are half like a human being”. [[330]]
The salmon is divine, and its symbol is worshipped. Folk-tales are told regarding salmon taking human shape, as do the seals in Scottish Gaelic stories. As in China and Japan, the fox is the most subtle of all beasts. It supplanted the tiger as chief god, according to an Ainu folk-tale. There is a great tortoise-god in the sea and an owl-god on the land, and their children have intermarried. The cock is of celestial origin. It was, at the beginning, sent down from heaven by the Creator to ascertain what the world looked like, but tarried for so long a time, being well pleased with things, that it was forbidden to return. Hares are mountain deities.
The oldest trees are the oak and pine, and they are therefore sacred, and the oldest and most sacred herb is the mugwort. In Kamschatka the pine is associated with the mugwort. The mugwort is connected with goddesses of the Artemis order.[15] Sacred, too, was the willow, and specially sacred the mistletoe that grew on a willow tree. An elixir prepared from the mistletoe was supposed to renew youth, and therefore to prolong life and cure diseases. Siberians venerate the herb willow.[16] The drink prepared from it was a soporific for human beings, wild animals, and deities. Far Eastern deities had apparently to be soothed as well as invoked as, it may be recalled, was Hathor-Sekhet in the Egyptian “flood myth”, when she was given beer poured out from jars, so that she might cease from slaughtering mankind.[17]
When the Ainu performed religious ceremonies, shavings and whittled sticks of willow were used, and libations of intoxicating liquors provided. Deities were made drunk, as in Babylonia,[18] and then provided with a [[331]]soothing anti-intoxicant. The Ainu set up their willow sticks at wells and around their dwellings. They had no temples, and when they worshipped the sun, a shaven willow stick was placed at the east end of a house.
The moon-god came next in order to the sun-god. The fire-god was invoked to cure disease. There was a subtle connection between fire and mistletoe, perhaps because fire was obtained by friction of soft and hard wood, and an intoxicating elixir prepared from a tree or its parasite was believed to be “fire water”—that is, “water of life”. Offerings were made to gods of ocean, rivers, and mountains.
The world was supposed to be floating on and surrounded by water, and to be resting on the spine of a gigantic fish which caused earthquakes when it moved. There were two heavens—one above the clouds and another in the Underworld. A hell, from which the volcanoes vomit fire, was reserved for the wicked.