Misogi and Harae

Summary

Misogi and harae are the two purification rites of ancient Japan. Misogi is washing the body with water so that pollution leaves it; harae is the removal of wrongdoing by what is paid for it and what is said over it. The origin of misogi in the Kojiki is the story of Izanagi after his return from Yomi, the land of the dead, where he had seen his wife Izanami with her body rotting. He said: "I have come to a hideous and polluted land, so I will perform the purification of my august person", and went to the plain of Awakihara by a small river mouth near Tachibana in Himuka on the island of Tsukushi. He threw down his staff, girdle, garments and bracelets one after another, and a deity was born from each. Then he said: "The water in the upper reach is too rapid, the water in the lower reach is too sluggish", went down into the middle reach and washed.

From the pollution he had contracted in the land of the dead two deities of calamity were born, Yasomagatsuhi and Ōmagatsuhi; after them two deities who rectify what these spoil, Kamunaobi and Ōnaobi, with Izunome. Then he washed in the depths, the middle and the surface of the water, and three sea deities and three Sumiyoshi deities were born. Then he washed his left eye and Amaterasu was born, his right eye and Tsukuyomi was born, his nose and Susanoo was born.

The first harae the Kojiki tells is Susanoo's own: when he had broken the ridges between the rice fields, filled the ditches and defiled the dining hall, and Amaterasu had hidden in the cave, the gods levied on him "a thousand stands of expiatory items", cut his beard and the nails of his hands and feet, and drove him out of heaven. So harae in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki means things given in compensation for wrongdoing. In 676 Emperor Tenmu ordered a great dispelling of wrongs in every corner of the land: one horse and one length of hemp cloth from each province, a sword, a deerskin, a hoe, a sickle, arrows and a sheaf of rice from each district official, and a bunch of hemp from each household.

The great purification, Ōharae, then became a court rite held twice a year, on the last day of the sixth month and the last day of the twelfth, attended by the emperor, his officials and their families, to cleanse the sins and pollutions people had gathered without knowing it. The Nakatomi recite at it words preserved in the tenth-century Engishiki. The words list the heavenly offences, such as breaking the divisions between rice fields, filling watercourses and flaying alive, and the earthly offences, such as cutting living and dead bodies, incest, calamities from creeping things and bewitchment. Then they say the offences will be swept away as the wind scatters the clouds and as a great ship cast off from its moorings drives out into the open sea: Seoritsu-hime, who dwells in the rapids that fall from the mountains, bears them out to the sea; Haya-akitsu-hime, who dwells where the tides meet, swallows them; Ibukido-nushi blows them out to the nether region; and Haya-sasura-hime, who dwells there, destroys them. At the end the diviners are ordered to take the hemp wands used in the purification to the great rivers.

The idea the two rites turn on is that what clings to a person can be separated from him and carried away. Pollution that comes from death is washed off with water; wrongdoing that comes from deeds is paid off or laid on something that carries it, and then the river takes it to the sea. What comes out of the water after the washing is a new creation: from Izanagi's washing were born the sun, the moon and the storm. The Kokugakuin commentary notes that the Kojiki tends to mention harae and misogi when a new ruler appears. The custom is older than the Kojiki: the Chinese History of Wei, in the third century, says that after a burial the people of Wa, that is Japan, sent the whole household into the water to wash.

We read the two names in the Arabic tongue like this, as readings proposed on the method. Harae is Old Japanese parape, and the verb parap- means "brush away, suppress, repent"; Old Japanese has a durative suffix -ap- and a word par-, "clear up". With the suffix taken off, the root is p-r, which is Arabic baraʾa: Lane says bariʾa min al-shayʾ means he became clear or free of a thing, bariʾa min al-dayn he became quit of the debt, bāraʾa sharīkahu he parted from his partner for a compensation, and istabraʾa he waited until she was purified. That is the old harae: things paid so that their owner may be quit of his wrongdoing. Misogi is Old Japanese misog-, "wash or purify the body in or with water", which contains sog-, that is sosok-, "pour, wash", which we read as Arabic saqā: Lane says saqāhu means he gave him water to drink, and saqā arḍahu he watered his land.

Linguistic Root

The Oxford-NINJAL Corpus of Old Japanese gives parap- as "brush (away), suppress, repent", parape as "purify oneself", and misog- as "wash or purify body in/with water", noting that the word has no phonographic attestations, so that it is not known whether the first syllable is mi or mwi, and that etymologies with midu, "water", and mwi, "body", have both been suggested without its being clear which is better. The Kokugakuin commentary says misogi has been explained as "dousing (sosogu) the body", and that harae originally meant dispelling wrongdoing by expiatory items, the two words being later merged as misogi harae.

So the reading of harae covers par-, and dividing the word into par- and -ap- is our analysis, though the corpus lists the two parts separately. Old Japanese p, which later became h, answers Arabic b, since Arabic has no p; r is r; and the final hamza of baraʾa does not survive. The reading of misogi covers sog-: s is s, and the g was k in sosok-, voiced inside the compound as happens in Japanese, answering q. The syllable mi stays Japanese, water or body. The limit of both readings is that they need further Japanese-Arabic pairs of the same kind.

Symbolic Reading

The Japanese rereading essay reads the story of Izanagi and Izanami geologically, as islands forming from volcanoes. The purification at the river mouth completes that reading on the side of water: the river takes what is on the body to the sea and the sea swallows it, so running water is what separates the living from the pollution. That is why the purification wands of the great purification are carried to the great rivers.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Japanese Semitic essay compares misogi with Islamic ablution and Christian baptism, calls purification by water "the only important similarity" between Shinto and the Semitic religions, and says it is a general human pattern. Closer to the great purification in the texts of the old East is whatever joins water to a carrier that takes the offence away. In Leviticus 16 Aaron lays his hands on the head of the live goat, confesses over it all the iniquities of the Israelites and sends it into the wilderness with an appointed man, "and the goat will carry on itself all their iniquities into a solitary place", and the man may not come back into the camp until he has washed his clothes and bathed in water. In the Babylonian Akitu Nabu's chapel is wiped with the carcass of a sheep that is then thrown into the river, and the two men who handled it go out into the open country and may not enter Babylon until the festival is over.

The difference is that in the Japanese purification the offence is not laid on an animal but on hemp wands and paid items, and is then handed on by the deities of water and wind one after another until it is destroyed in the nether region. Izanagi's washing after his descent to the underworld makes purity the condition of returning to the living. See kami and matsuri.