The Hero with a Thousand Faces

When Raven entered the room, the woman looked up and cried: “How did you get here? You are the first man to enter this place.” Raven told what he had done, and she bade him take a seat on the opposite side of the room. This woman was the soul (inua) of the whale. She spread a meal before the visitor, gave him berries and oil, and told him, meanwhile, how she had gathered the berries the year before. Raven remained four days as guest of the inua in the belly of the whale, and during the entire period was trying to ascertain what kind of tube that could be, running along the ceiling. Every time the woman left the room, she forbade him to touch it. But now, when she again went out, he walked over to the lamp, stretched out his claw, and caught on it a big drop, which he licked off with his tongue. It was so sweet that he repeated the act, and then proceeded to catch drop after drop, as fast as they fell. Presently, however, his greed found this too slow, and so he reached up, broke off a piece of the tube, and ate it. Hardly had he done so, when a great gush of oil poured into the room, extinguished the light, and the chamber itself began to roll heavily back and forth. This rolling went on for four days. Raven was almost dead with fatigue and with the terrible noise that stormed around him all the while. But then everything quieted down and the room lay still; for Raven had broken one of the heart-arteries, and the whale-cow had died. The inua never returned. The body of the whale was washed ashore.

But now Raven was a prisoner. While he pondered what he should do, he heard two men talking, up on the back of the animal, and they decided to summon all the people from the village to help with the whale. Very soon they had cut a hole in the upper part of the great body.* When it was large enough, and all the people had gone off with pieces of meat to carry them high up on the shore, Raven stepped out unnoticed. But no sooner had he reached the ground than he remembered he had left his fire sticks within. He took off his coat and mask, and pretty soon the people saw a small, black man, wrapped up in a queer animal skin approaching them. They looked at him curiously. The man offered to help, rolled up his sleeves, and set to work.

In a little while, one of the people working in the interior of the whale shouted, “Look what I have found! Fire sticks in the belly of the whale!” Raven said, “My, but this is bad! My daughter once told me that when fire sticks are found inside a whale that people have cut open, many of these people will die! I’m for running!” He rolled down his sleeves again and made away. The people hurried to follow his example. And so that was how Raven, who then doubled back, had, for a time, the whole feast to himself.^[11]

Shintō, “The Way of the Gods,” the tradition native to the Japanese as distinguished from the imported Butsudō, or “Way of the Buddha,” is a way of devotion to the guardians of life and custom (local spirits, ancestral powers, heroes, the divine king, one’s living parents, and one’s living children) as distinguished from the powers that yield release from the round (Bodhisattvas and Buddhas). The way of worship is primarily that of preserving and cultivating purity of heart: “What is ablution? It is not merely cleansing the body with holy water, but following the Right and Moral Way.”^[12] “What pleases the Deity is virtue and sincerity, not any number of material offerings.”^[13]

Amaterasu, ancestress of the Royal House, is the chief divinity of the numerous folk pantheon, yet herself only the highest manifestation of the unseen, transcendent yet immanent, Universal God: “The Eight Hundred Myriads of Gods are but differing manifestations of one unique Deity, Kunitokotachi-no-Kami, The Eternally Standing Divine Being of the Earth, The Great Unity of All Things in the Universe, The Primordial Being of Heaven and Earth, eternally existing from the beginning to the end of the world.”^[14] “What deity does Amaterasu worship in abstinence in the Plain of High Heaven? She worships her own Self within as a Deity, endeavoring to cultivate divine virtue in her own person by means of inner purity and thus becoming one with the Deity.”^[15]