The great serpent that came to the upper reaches of the river Hi in Izumo. The Kojiki describes eyes like winter-cherry, eight heads and eight tails on one body, moss and cypress and cedar growing on its back, a length spanning eight valleys and eight ridges, and a belly always raw with blood.
It came each year and ate one of the daughters of Ashinazuchi and Tenazuchi. Of the eight, the last remaining was Kushinada-hime.
In this Bureau's register, this is the only entry classed as an aramitama — a violent spirit. It is not enshrined; it is the thing that was subdued.
Yet in Japanese thought the raging and the venerated are not cut off from one another. The violent spirit is not the opposite of the gentle one but the same power in another aspect. That a divine treasure came out of the severed tail says this was never simple evil.
There is an old reading of the serpent as the flooding river Hi itself: eight heads for the branching channels, red eyes and a raw belly for the iron sand that stains the bed upstream, a daughter eaten each year for the annual flood.
Whether the reading is correct has never been settled. But a story in which an iron sword comes out of the cut tail sits easily in a country that produced iron sand.
Flood, calamity, and the treasure that appears only through being defeated. Yaegaki and Suga shrines in Shimane are closely tied to Susanoo and Kushinada-hime after the slaying; shrines to the serpent itself are few.
It is natural that the defeated party has no shrine of its own. The name has lasted more than a thousand years regardless.
A stick that is not ordinary: violently twisted, split into limbs that wind around each other, set hard with a vine still wrapped through it — a shape that makes you hesitate for a moment.
The Bureau sends this entry down on sticks furthest from ordered beauty. If Susanoo settles on a rough stick, this one settles beyond that: not merely rough, but somehow wrongly shaped.
Note: this section is the Bureau's own reading, not a record from the chronicles.
The share of issued certificates in which this kami appeared. It shifts as more sticks are appraised. Variant spellings are reconciled before counting.
No published certificate bears this kami yet.