Many other curious things the Guji and his chief priest then related to
me; telling me the sacred name of each of the courts, and of the fences
and holy groves and the multitudinous shrines and their divinities; even
the names of the great pillars of the temple, which are nine in number,
the central pillar being called the august Heart-Pillar of the Middle.
All things within the temple grounds have sacred names, even the torii
and the bridges.
The priest Sasa called my attention to the fact that the great shrine of
Oho-kuni-nushi-no-Kami faces west, though the great temple faces east,
like all Shinto temples. In the other two shrines of the same apartment,
both facing east, are the first divine Kokuzo of Izumo, his seventeenth
descendant, and the father of Nominosukune, wise prince and famous
wrestler. For in the reign of the Emperor Sui-nin one Kehaya of
Taima had boasted that no man alive was equal to himself in strength.
Nominosukune, by the emperor's command, wrestled with Kehaya, and threw
him down so mightily that Kehaya's ghost departed from him. This was
the beginning of wrestling in Japan; and wrestlers still pray unto
Nominosukune for power and skill.
There are so many other shrines that I could not enumerate the names
of all their deities without wearying those readers unfamiliar with the
traditions and legends of Shinto. But nearly all those divinities who
appear in the legend of the Master of the Great Land are still believed
to dwell here with him, and here their shrines are: the beautiful one,
magically born from the jewel worn in the tresses of the Goddess of the
Sun, and called by men the Torrent-Mist Princess--and the daughter of
the Lord of the World of Shadows, she who loved the Master of the
Great Land, and followed him out of the place of ghosts to become his
wife--and the deity called 'Wondrous-Eight-Spirits,' grandson of the
'Deity of Water-Gates,' who first made a fire-drill and platters of
red clay for the august banquet of the god at Kitzuki--and many of the
heavenly kindred of these.