Thereupon they thrust down the jewel-spear of Heaven[1] and groping about therewith found the ocean. The brine which
- ↑ Hirata conjectures that the jewel-spear (nu-boko or tama-boko) of Heaven was in form like a wo-bashira.
Wo-bashira.
Wo-bashira means literally male-pillar. This word is usually applied to the end-posts or pillars of a railing or balustrade, no doubt on account of the shape of the top, which ends in a sort of a ball (the nu or tama), supposed to resemble the glans. That by wo-bashira Hirata means a phallus is clear from his quoting as its equivalent the Chinese expression 玉莖, i.e. jewel-stalk, an ornate word for the penis. A Japanese word for this is wo-hashi, or wo-bashi, which contains nearly the same etymological elements as wo-bashira.
A writer quoted in the Tsū-shō commentary on the "Nihongi," says that the Tama-boko (or nu-boko) is the root of coition.
The late Mr. J. O'Neill, in his "Night of the Gods" (pp. 31, 37, 67), proposed the theory that this spear and other spears of myth "are but symbols of the Earth-axis and its prolongation," an idea which is worked out with much ingenuity and learning in that remarkable work. At p. 88 he argues that this view is not inconsistent with the phallic interpretation.
There are other indications in the "Nihongi" and "Kojiki" of phallic worship in Ancient Japan, although, probably owing to the influence of Chinese ideas of literary propriety, there are fewer than might have been expected, Vide Index—Phallic worship.
All travellers in Japan, especially before the Revolution of 1868, must have observed numerous evidences of a phallic cult. The Government have of recent years done their best to suppress this very gross form of nature worship, but it still exists in out-of-the-way places, as has been shown in an interesting Essay by Dr. Edmund Buckley, of the University of Chicago, who has collected numerous facts relating to this subject. Dr. Griffis, in his "Religions of Japan," has also noticed several evidences of it.
Travelling from Utsunomiya to Nikko, in 1871, I found the road lined at intervals with groups of phalli, connected, no doubt, with the worship of the Sacred Mountain Nan-tai (male-form), which was visited every summer by
very conjectural. Some are probably names of places. Possibly some of the obscurer names are Corean. The "Seishiroku" speaks of a Corean Sagiri no Mikoto, and other known Corean Deities were worshipped in Japan. The reader will do well to consult here Satow's "Japanese Rituals" in "J.A.S.T.," Vol. VI., Pt. II., p. 120, where he makes the pregnant suggestion that the sun was the earliest among the powers of nature to be deified, and that the long series of gods who precede her in the cosmogony of the "Kojiki" and "Nihongi," most of whom are shown by their names to have been mere abstractions, were invented to give her a genealogy.
