同胞神の民族文化史的考察

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The religion and mythology of many peoples have a specific pair of deities who originally belonged to two separate peoples or tribes, but who became related to each other as siblings. The author takes up Osiris and Set in the Egyptian mythology, Odin and Loki in the Nordic, and Apollon-Artemis and Zeus-Poseidon in the Greek. He finds that : (1) All these sibling-deities are a product of the contact, struggle and fusion between two different peoples. (2) The ethno-historical conditions which have produced these sibling relations are diverse. (3) Nevertheless, the religious policy of the dominant people towards the conquered and the fear of the magical power of strangers, on the one hand, and the hatred and resistance of the conquered against the dominant people, on the other hand, generally result in producing the following characteristics of one of the sibling-deities, i. e. the god of the vanquished people who has entered into partnership with the god of the conquering people : (a) Dual personality, being the principle of the good as well as the principle of the evil. (b) Incessant aggressiveness and resistance against the partner-god without any justifiable reason. In the second part, the author analyses the problem of the goddess Amaterasu and her younger brother Susano-o-no-mikoto in the classical myth of Japan. He makes clear that these sibling-deities were originally two independent beings who had no blood-relationship to each other-a powerful goddess of the "Takama-ga-hara people" and a great god of the "Izumo people". On the basis of a comparative study in many characteristic phenomena common to some sibling-deities, he assumes that : (1) The hitherto prevalent view that Susano-o-no-mikoto was a storm-god, as he kept crying and created a commotion, is inadequate. "Crying and commotion" was an ancient magico-religious act to invoke kami. (2) The god was primarily one of the Izumo deities presiding over rain and agriculture. Therefore the myth of his ravaging rice-fields of Takama-ga-hara is not the manifestation of his storm-god character, as is usually believed, but one of the attempts on the side of the "Takama-ga-hara people" to change him into an evil being, utilizing his function as rain-maker and agricultural god. (3) The myth of the "weaver-girl of heavenly cloths" being wounded to death by the violent act of Susano-o-no-mikoto might have been an euphemistic modification of the original form in which Amaterasu herself was wounded to death.
日本文化人類学会の論文

著者

松村武雄
日本民族学協会

同胞神の民族文化史的考察

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