Dema Deities

Dema Deities holds a specific mythological type in which a deity's own body becomes the world's first cultivated food because that deity is killed. Uke Mochi is the atlas's one entry for it so far. The Nihongi's account of her death at Tsukuyomi's hand does not end with the killing; it ends with cattle, horses, silkworms, millet, rice, wheat and beans growing from parts of her body, so that hospitality, the meal she made from her own flesh for a guest she had never met, and catastrophe, his revulsion and violence, both stand behind the same harvest the story still credits to her. The category is not this atlas's invention. It is a recognized comparative type in the study of religion, described from ethnography on the island of Ceram and since applied to structurally similar killed-deity, harvest-origin myths recorded across unrelated cultures, so naming it here files Uke Mochi under an existing scholarly bracket rather than a coined one.

The heading is deliberately kept to one member rather than folded into a larger one. Uke Mochi's own record already narrates the killing's cost to Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, filed under Celestial Deities for their own separate office as the sun and the moon; the dema deities heading exists instead to hold the side of the story that belongs to Uke Mochi herself, the deity whose death and whose body are the point, distinct from the deities whose estrangement is the story's consequence for someone else. A second entry belongs here only when another catalogued figure's own myth follows this same shape, a body becoming food through death rather than death being incidental to some other office; nothing else the atlas currently holds does.