Like the Chinese, the Ainu tell stories of visits paid to Paradise. A man, whose wife had been spirited away, appealed to the oak-god, who provided him with a golden horse on which he rode to the sky. He reached a beautiful city in which people went about singing constantly. They smelled a stranger, and, the smell being offensive to them, they appealed to the chief god to give him his wife. The god promised to do so if the visitor would agree to go away at once. He consented readily, and returned to the oak-god, who told him his wife was in hell, and that the place was now in confusion because the chief god had ordered a search to be made for her. Soon afterwards the lost woman was restored to her husband. This man was given the golden horse to keep, and all the horses in Ainu-land are descended from it.
Another man once chased a bear on a mountain side. [[332]]The animal entered a cave, and he followed it, passing through a long, dark tunnel. He reached the beautiful land of the Underworld. Feeling hungry, he ate grapes and mulberries, and, to his horror, was immediately transformed into a serpent. He crawled back to the entrance and fell asleep below a pine tree. In his dream the goddess of the tree appeared. She told him he had been transformed into a serpent because he had eaten of the food of Hades, and that, if he wished to be restored to human shape, he must climb to the top of the tree and fling himself down. When he awoke, the man-serpent did as the goddess advised. After leaping from the tree top, he found himself standing below it, while near him lay the body of a great serpent which had been split open. He then went through the tunnel and emerged from the cave. But later he had another dream, in which the goddess appeared and told him he must return to the Underworld because a goddess there had fallen in love with him. He did as he was commanded to do, and was never again seen on earth.
A story tells of another Ainu who reached this Paradise. He saw many people he had known in the world, but they were unable to see him. Only the dogs perceived him, and they growled and barked. Catching sight of his father and mother he went forward to embrace them, but they complained of being haunted by an evil spirit, and he had to leave them.
The Ainu have a Deluge Myth which tells that when the waters rose the vast majority of human beings were destroyed. Only a remnant escaped by ascending to the summit of a high mountain.[19] [[333]]
Although the Ainu claimed to have exterminated the Koro-pok-guru, it is possible that they really intermixed with them and derived some of their religious ideas and myths from them, and that, in turn, the Japanese were influenced by both Ainu and Koro-pok-guru ideas and myths. The aniconic pillars and the female goddess with fish termination (the Dragon Mother) figure in Japanese as well as Ainu religion. Both are found in Kamschatka, too. Dr. Rendel Harris, commenting on the pillar and fish-goddess idols of the Kamschatdals,[20] recalls “the various fish forms of Greek and Oriental religions, the Dagon and Derceto of the Philistines, the Oannes of the Assyrians,[21] Eurynome of the Greek legends, and the like”. The pillar, sometimes shown to be clad with ivy, links with the symbols of Hermes and Dionysos. He adds: “The Kamschatdals and other Siberian tribes manufacture for themselves intoxicating and stupefying drinks which have a religious value, and are employed by their Shamans in order to produce prophetic states of inspiration”. The Japanese manufactured sake from rice with precisely the same motive, and, like the Ainu, offered their liquor to the gods.
What attracted the Koro-pok-guru and the Ainu to Japan? As we have seen (Chapter III), the primary incentive for sea-trafficking and prospecting by sea and land was the desire to obtain wealth in the form of pearls, precious stones, and metals. Now, pearls are found round the Japanese coasts. Marco Polo has recorded that in his day the people of Japan practised the mortuary custom (obtaining also in China) of placing pearls in the mouths of the dead. “In the Island of Zipangu[22] (Japan),” [[334]]he says, “rose-coloured pearls were abundant, and quite as valuable as white ones.” Kaempfer, writing in the eighteenth century, stated that the Japanese pearls were found in small varieties of oysters (akoja) resembling the Persian pearl oyster, and also in “the yellow snail-shell”, the taira gai (Placuna), and the awabi or abalone (Haliotis). A pearl fishery formerly existed in the neighbourhood of Saghalin Island. As pearls have from the earliest times been fished from southern Manchurian rivers, in Kamschatka, and on the south coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, it may be that the earliest settlers in Japan were prehistoric pearl-fishers. It is of special interest to note here that, according to G. A. Cooke, pearls and ginseng (mandrake) were formerly Manchurian articles of commerce.[23] The herbs and pearls were, as we have seen, regarded as “avatars” of the mother-goddess.
In Korea ginseng is cultivated under Government supervision. “It is”, Mrs. Bishop writes,[24] “one of the most valuable articles which Korea exports, and one great source of its revenue.” A basket may contain ginseng worth £4000. “But,” she adds, “valuable as the cultivated root is, it is nothing to the value of the wild, which grows in Northern Korea, a single specimen of which has been sold for £40! It is chiefly found in the Kang-ge Mountains, but it is rare, and the search so often ends in failure, that the common people credit it with magical properties, and believe that only men of pure lives can [[335]]find it.” The dæmon who is “the tutelary spirit of ginseng … is greatly honoured” (p. 243). A ready market is found in China for Korean ginseng. “It is a tonic, a febrifuge, a stomachic, the very elixir of life, taken spasmodically or regularly in Chinese wine by most Chinese who can afford it” (p. 95).
In Japan, ginseng, mushroom, and fungus are, like pearls, promoters of longevity, and sometimes, says Joly, “masquerade as phalli”: they are “Plants of Life” and “Plants of Birth”, like the plants searched for by the Babylonian heroes Gilgamesh and Etana, and like the dragon-herbs of China.[25]
In Shinto, the ancient religion of the Japanese, prominence is given to pearls and other precious jewels, and even to ornaments like artificial beads, which were not, of course, used merely for personal decoration in the modern sense of the term; beads had a religious significance. A sacred jewel is a tama, a name which has deep significance in Japan, because mi-tama is a soul, or spirit, or double. Mi is usually referred to as an “honorific prefix” or “honorific epithet”, but it appears to have been originally something more than that. A Japanese commentator, as De Visser notes, has pointed out in another connection[26] that mi is “an old word for snake”, that is, for a snake-dragon. Mi-tama, therefore, may as “soul” or “double” be all that is meant by “snake-pearl” or “dragon-pearl”.[27] [[336]]The pearl, as we have seen, contained “soul substance”, the “vital principle”, the blood of the Great Mother, like the “jasper of Isis” worn by women to promote birth, and therefore to multiply and prolong life; in China and Japan the pearl was placed in the mouth of the dead to preserve the corpse from decay and ensure longevity or immortality. The connection between jewels and medicine is found among the Maya of Central America. Cit Bolon Tun (the “nine precious stones”) was a god of medicine. The goddess Ix Tub Tun (“she who spits out precious stones”) was “the goddess of the workers in jade and amethysts”. She links with Tlaloc’s wife.
According to Dr. W. G. Aston[28] tama contains the root of the verb tabu, “to give”, more often met with in its lengthened form tamafu. “Tama retains its original significance in tama-mono, a gift thing, and toshi-dama, a new year’s present. Tama next means something valuable, as a jewel. Then, as jewels are mostly globular in shape,[29] it has come to mean anything round. At the same time, owing to its precious quality, it is used symbolically for the sacred emanation from God which dwells in his shrine, and also for that most precious thing, the human life or soul.… The element tama enters into the names of several deities. The food-goddess is called either Ukemochi no Kami or Uka no mi-tama.” Phallic deities are also referred to as mi-tama. The mi-tama is sometimes used in much the same sense as the Egyptian Ka: it is the spirit or double of a deity which dwells in a shrine, where it is provided with a shintai (“god body”)—a jewel, weapon, stone, mirror, pillow, or some such object.