Would you eat food that came from a goddess’s butt?
Today on mythology for slackers who should really be doing their homework, I bring you
the story of how Tsukuyomi (月読) became the god of the moon, and how food came to
the world from a butt.
They’re related.
So Amaterasu (天照) was the Shinto Goddess of the Sun.
She ruled over the heavens.
Her brother, Tsukuyomi, ruled the night.
He is now known as the God of the Moon, but it didn’t start out that way.
It happened after a murder.
One day, Amaterasu gave her brother a mission.
He was to go visit a kami named Ukemochi no kami (保食神) to see how she was doing.
A kami is basically one of the bajillion gods or spirits in the Shinto religion.
Ukemochi was the kami of food.
When Tsukuyomi arrived at Ukemochi’s residence, she welcomed him graciously.
Being a kami of food, she prepared for him a great feast.
She turned to the land and opened her mouth wide, and from it emerged rice, fully cooked.
She turned to the sea and opened her mouth wide, and from it emerged all kinds of fishes.
She turned to the mountains and opened her mouth wide, and from it emerged all kinds
of animals like deer and oxen.
It was a great feast fit for a great being like Tsukuyomi.
Unfortunately, Tsukuyomi didn’t feel so great, he felt disgusted.
In Shinto, there’s an obsession with maintaining purity and cleanliness.
Food being vomited out of a mouth like that just wasn’t pure.
He thought it was rude for a host to treat a guest like that,
so he killed her, politely.
When Amaterasu heard the news, she was like, “what the hell, I sent you there on a friendly
mission, not to kill your host you overreactor.”
Then she proceeded to overreact by making sure she never saw her brother Tsukuyomi again.
Through her heavenly powers, she made Tsukuyomi the God of the Moon.
Remember, she was the Goddess of the Sun.
Since the Sun and Moon are never in the sky at the same time, she never had to look upon
him again.
Now the astronomically astute among you may say, “But Linfamy, actually the Moon does
appear in the sky during the day.”
While this is true, I urge you to keep it to yourself, nerd, unless you wanna spend
the rest of the day in a school locker.
This kind.
So Amaterasu sent someone to examine the body.
Turns out, Ukemochi really got into her role as food kami.
If you opened up a normal body, say my body, you’d find organs like a heart, kidneys,
and two gigantic balls, but when they opened up Ukemochi’s body, they found food and
agriculture type things.
Like these.
From her head came oxen and horses.
From her forehead came millet, a popular cereal crop.
From her eyebrows came silkworms.
From her eyes came panic grass, aah!
From her belly came rice.
And from her southern rainforest came more than one thing.
Wheat, soybean, and red beans.
There was a lot of activity on her southern border.
Amaterasu saw these products Ukemochi had made, and they were very good.
She decided these things should be used by humans.
And so she sowed the first rice seeds in the fields.
This was the origin of food and agriculture.
She also pulled silk thread from the silkworm using her mouth, and this started the practice
of silkworm farming.
Now there’s actually another version of this story, where it was Amaterasu’s other
brother, Susanoo, who asked for food from the food kami.
In this version, she also extracted food from her body holes, but worse holes.
Food came out of her mouth, her nostrils, and her
rear hole.
Susanoo was disgusted.
He didn’t want to eat from her asshole, so he killed her instead.
Again, food came out from her body parts.
From her head, silkworms.
From her eyes, rice seeds.
From her ears, millet.
From her nose, red beans.
From her southern rainforest, wheat.
And from her posterior puncture came soybeans.
At this point you may be saying, “But Linfamy, it doesn’t make sense.
If all food came from this event, what did they eat before?”
That’s it, into the locker you go.
Japan was an agrarian society, so food was really important.
These myths reveal a bit about what the ancient Japanese thought of food.
When Ukemochi died, food emerged from her body.
The Japanese believed in a connection between life and death, growth and decay.
These things seem to be contradictory, but similar to a yin-yang philosophy, they thought
one cannot exist without the other.
Animals die to make room for their offspring.
Plants die to make room for the next season’s crops.
Another seeming contradiction here is about purity, something very important in Shinto.
The food that Ukemochi provided was pure, but Ukemochi herself was not.
I mean, she pulled out whole meals from her butt.
Here we see a bit of the good old anti-female ideas popping up, especially as Chinese culture
began to take hold.
The important food kami in Shinto are mostly female.
Cooking was generally associated with women.
And what comes to mind when you think of women?
Menstrual and birth blood, that’s right, very good.
These things were impure.
Like Ukemochi, it implies that although the food that women made were pure, the women
themselves were inherently impure.
But yeah, I’d happily eat food from a goddess’s butt.
Alright guys, today’s pop quiz question is this:
What animal did the Ainu people sometimes keep as pets, and even breastfed?
I’ll randomly pick the winner in 24 hours, and you can choose one of these charms.
No lie.
Last week’s winner was athenearosa. Congrats!
This week could be you. Good luck.
Want more Japanese mythology?
There may or may not be a playlist here.
So we have a new emperor this week, Colonel Sy.
Thank you, Colonel. You’re awesome.
And the new Patreon patrons are JustSomeNerdyWeeb, Nolan LeBlanc, Dylan Barnes, Per Nielsen,
and Megumi Tierana.
Thanks you guys.
Alright much love to you, and--
The Sun will come out tomorrow.
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow,
will be hot as f-