Omoikane

Omoikane is the Japanese kami of wisdom, counsel and sound judgement, whose name is understood to mean something like he who combines and weighs the thoughts of many, the intelligence that gathers up the deliberations of all the gods. He plays his part at two pivotal moments of the Kojiki myth. When the sun-goddess Amaterasu hides herself in the rock-cave and the world falls into darkness, it is Omoikane whom the assembled kami charge with devising a plan to lure her out, and the stratagem he contrives, the crowing cocks, the mirror and the jewels, and the dance of Ame-no-Uzume, succeeds in drawing her forth and restoring light to the world. Later, when Heaven resolves to bring the earthly land under its rule, Omoikane is again the deity consulted on which messenger to send. He is thus the personification of wise counsel in the councils of the gods, and is enshrined and invoked accordingly, notably in connection with learning and good decision.

Omoikane's genealogy places him at a meeting point between two of the most important lineages in early Shinto mythology. He is named as the son of Takamimusubi, one of the small group of primordial creator deities who appear at the very opening of the Kojiki alongside Amenominakanushi, and who functions throughout the mythology as a kind of second center of divine authority in the High Plain of Heaven, distinct from and sometimes acting alongside the sun goddess Amaterasu's own line of descent. This parentage helps explain why Omoikane, rather than a deity drawn from Amaterasu's immediate circle, is repeatedly the one consulted at moments when the two great heavenly authorities need to act in concert, devising the scheme to lure Amaterasu from the cave, and later helping to determine which god should be sent to pacify and eventually rule the earthly land that Amaterasu's descendants would inherit.

Takamimusubi is often read by scholars as reflecting an older or rival strand of Yamato-period political theology, a heavenly authority tied to the ruling clans' own ancestral claims running alongside, and occasionally in tension with, the solar lineage that ultimately became dominant in the official mythology compiled in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. Omoikane, as the son who provides the crucial wisdom at the decisive moments of both texts, can be read as the point where these two currents of heavenly authority, the sun line and the Takamimusubi line, are made to cooperate rather than compete, his gift for counsel serving narratively to reconcile what may once have been separate traditions of divine sovereignty.