Syntactics and pragmatics of Ancient Japanese divination

Abstract

The study is devoted to the meaning and the main types of divinatory practices in the Japanese antiquity. The main objects of the study are the texts written in 8^th c., such as two mythological and historic annals, “Records of Ancient Matters” (“Kojiki”) and “The Chronicles of Japan” (“Nihon shoki”), an anthology of the ancient Japanese poetry “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves” (“Man’yōshū”) and “Records of Customs and Lands” (“Fudoki”), the last one representing some kind of ancient gazetteers.

Remarkably, the rites of divination in these annals are mentioned beginning from the earliest stage of the Japanese cosmological history. First of all, the rite is performed when the pair of ancestors is going to give birth to the world between Heaven and Earth; the next two episodes are also highly important in the cultural history of Japan, one being the story concerning Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, who concealed herself for a time in the Rocky Celestial Cave, and the second is connected with the descent of her grandchild from Heaven to Earth in order to rule Japan.

We are also going to introduce and analyze the (“Newly compiled record of turtle omens” (“Shinsen kisōki”). This text, compiled presumably in 9^th c., contains some myths of Urabe, the guild of official diviners. From it, for example, we learn the mythical explanation of the fact that divination with a deer blade (scapulimancy) was officially rejected at the state level in favor of divination with the turtle shell (plastromancy).

The main object of the paper is also to present some suggestions about the peculiarities of the Japanese type of communication with the gods during the rite of divination.