Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters) · 42 of 191

[Sect. XXXV.—The Duchess of Saru.]

So then he charged Her Augustness the Heavenly-Alarming-Female [saying]: “Do thou, who wast the one to make known this Great Deity Prince of Saruta who respectfully served as my august vanguard, 1 respectfully escort him [back]; and do thou likewise bear the august name of that Deity, and respectfully serve me.” Wherefore the Duchesses of Saru bear the name of the Male Deity the Prince of Saruta, and the women are Duchesses of Saru. 2

Insight

Uzume, the alarming-female who danced erotically before the cave (chapter 23, where her dance drew Amaterasu out) is here given a permanent office: ‘Saru-me,’ the female Duke of Saru, by Ninigi himself. The ‘Saru-me’ title—a hereditary office for female ritualists—survived into historical times; female members of this family served as ritual dancers and shamanesses at the court for centuries. The Kojiki is performing the same archaeological function it performed for the Munakata in chapter 21: a real eighth-century female priestly office is being traced back to its mythological origin. What’s distinctive in this case is that the office is matrilineal—the title ‘Duke’ (kimi, a male title in normal usage) is held by women in this family. Chamberlain’s footnote remarks on the oddity. The Kojiki is preserving evidence of a substratum of female ritual office in early Japan that the more patriarchal Confucian-influenced courtly culture of the medieval period would later suppress; postwar female scholarship on early Japan (Yoshie Akiko, Joan Piggott) has reconstructed how extensive this substratum was.

Footnotes 138:1 See Sect. XXXIII from a little before Note 11 to Note 17.

138:2 Q.d., instead of the men being Dukes, as would be more natural. The title was confined to females (see Sect. XXXIII. Note 33).