著者

石田 英一郎

出版者

日本文化人類学会

雑誌

民族學研究 (ISSN:00215023)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.15, no.1, pp.1-10, 1950

---

N. Nevskii recorded on the islands of Miyako, Okinawa, a folk-tale which explains the dark spots on the moon as the form of a man carrying two water-pails with a pole, as a punishment for his sin of pouring water of rejuvenescence on serpents, and water of death on men, the opposite of what the gods had ordered him to do. Although the present-day Japanese see in the moon-spots a hare pounding rice-cake, we find in the Manyoshu, compiled in the 7-8th centuries, the phrase "water or rejuvenescence in the hands of Tsukiyomi (moon, moon-man)". The above-mentioned Okinawan tale suggests that the Japanese also had at one time a belief that the moon-man carried the water of life. The author traces the distribution of the motif of the humam figure with a water-pail (or pails) in the moon from Northern Europe through Siberia (the Yakuts, the Buryats, the Tungus) and East Asia (the Goldi, the Gilyaks, the Ainu, the Okinawans) to N. W. North America (the Tlingit, the Haida, the Kwakiutl) and New Zealand. He traces the motif of a hare (or a rat) from South Africa through India, the South Seas, Tibet, China, Mongolia, Japan etc. to North America, and finds in some folk-beliefs with the latter motif the same idea of the origin of human death as in Okinawa. Both motifs must have originated in the primitive belief of seeing in the eternal repetition of waxing and waning of the moon its immortal life or rejuvenescence, and the water carried by the moon-man (or moon-woman) must originally have meant the water of life or rejuvenescence, as in the case of the Okinawan folk-tale.