When Izanagi returned to earth he bathed in the sea in order to remove the pollution incurred by his visit to Yomi, and in so doing produced a number of deities, some of whom are Ocean-gods and others associated with the ancient Japanese ceremonies of religious purification. =Susa no wo and the Sun-Goddess.=—Susa no wo (the Rain-storm god) was at first appointed to rule the Sea, but he preferred to join his mother, Izanami, in Hades, and was accordingly despatched thither by his father. Before taking his departure, however, he ascended to heaven to take leave of his elder sister Amaterasu, the Sun-goddess. All the mountains and rivers shook, and every land and country quaked as he passed upwards. Amaterasu, in alarm, armed herself as a warrior with sword and bow, stamped her feet into the hard ground up to her thighs, kicking away the earth like rotten snow, and, confronting him like a valiant man, challenged him to declare the reason of his coming. Susa no wo protested that it was only a friendly visit, and as a proof of his good intentions proposed that they should produce children between them by each one crunching in his mouth and spurting out fragments of the sword and jewels worn by the other. One of the children thus born was called _Masaya a katsu kachi hayahi ama no oshihomimi_, the forefather of the present Imperial dynasty. There were seven others who figure largely in the genealogies of the Japanese nobility. But the true nature of the Rain-storm god was not long repressed. He destroyed his sister’s rice-fields, defiled the sacred hall where she was celebrating the harvest festival, and flung a piebald colt that had been flayed backwards into the sacred weaving-room where the garments of the gods were woven. The Sun-goddess had borne his previous outrages with calmness and forbearance, but this last (a malicious magical practice?) was beyond endurance. She retired in disgust and shut herself up in the Rock-cave of Heaven, leaving the world to darkness. This proceeding of Amaterasu was followed by dire results. ‘The voices of the evil deities were like unto the flies in the fifth moon as they swarmed, and a myriad portents of woe arose.’ The gods, in consternation, held an assembly in the dry bed of the River of Heaven (the Milky Way) to devise means for inducing her to emerge from the cave, and a number of expedients were adopted which were evidently borrowed from the ritual of the time when the myth became current. The deities who were specially concerned with this duty are obvious counterparts of the actual officials of the Mikado’s Court, and included a prayer-reciter, an offering-provider, a mirror-maker, a jewel-maker, a diviner, with—according to some accounts—many others. All this is most convenient for the genealogists of later times. Amaterasu at length reappeared, to the great delight of everybody. Susa no wo was fined in a thousand tables of offerings and expelled from Heaven. Before proceeding to Yomi, he went down to