The provenance file on Susanō
Catalogue entry — Susanō. Every claim below carries its chain of custody.
Provenance
1. The attestation. 須佐之男命 — "Swift impetuous male deity; the Shinto storm god". On record: Kojiki 1 (birth, rampage, Orochi, Suga), Nihon Shoki 1 (Somin Shōrai, variant accounts), Philippi, Kojiki, Aston, Nihongi.
2. The preserved evidence. o → ō (Macron: long vowel) — absent from the ASCII form susanoo, present in the restoration, verifiable against the sources above.
3. The narrative record. From the Nose of Izanagi — When Izanagi purified himself after his flight from Yomi, Amaterasu was born from his left eye and Tsukuyomi from his right; from his nose came Susanoo, whose name the Kojiki writes 須佐之男 and glosses as the swift, impetuous male deity. Izanagi charged him with rule of the sea. The Test and the Trampling — Climbing to heaven to bid his sister farewell, Susanoo alarmed Amaterasu, who went out armed; he protested his innocence and proposed an ukei, a covenant of sincerity, exchanging ornaments so that she bore three goddesses from his sword and he five gods from her necklace (Kojiki 1). The test cleared him — and he repaid it by trampling down the ridges of her rice-fields, filling the ditches, and flaying the heavenly piebald horse, whose carcass he hurled through the roof of her weaving hall, killing the maiden within.
4. The physical record. Susanoo's cult centers mark the geography of his myth. Suga Jinja in Izumo City preserves the site of his post-serpent palace within the orbit of Izumo Ōyashiro, Japan's oldest shrine tradition. In Kyōto, Yasaka Shrine — the medieval home of his Gozu Tennō identity — is documented from the ninth century, and the Gion Matsuri's plague-warding origins are recorded in the late ninth-century court chronicles. Atsuta Jingū in Nagoya has revered the Kusanagi sword, said to rest there, since the Kofun period. Serpent-quelling imagery recurs in shrine carvings and festival regalia across Japan, where dragon-slaying scenes guard thresholds to this day.
5. The current holding. The temple at /susanoo/, classified Tier 1. What survives here cannot be shown in ASCII: a feature of the original that the fallback alphabet flattens. That is the Tier-1 test, and this name passes it without argument.
6. The documented resonances. Maritime, Shipping & Ocean Industries, Mythic Name Restoration, Meteorology & Weather Intelligence — seats argued and weighted in the pattern atlas, read through the myths in this temple's Resonance File.
7. The primary sources. Kojiki, Nihon Shoki — the library this file answers to, open at the Sacred Texts collection.
8. The continuing record. Izumo keeps his memory at Suga Jinja, and the sword he won from the serpent is counted among the imperial regalia — its physical keeper is Atsuta Jingū in Nagoya, which has revered Kusanagi since the Kofun period. The Gion Matsuri, among Japan's most famous festivals, descends from rites to his epidemic-fusing form, and serpent-quelling imagery guards thresholds in shrines across the country.
At a Glance
- Restored name: Susanō
- ASCII form: susanoo
- Meaning: "Swift impetuous male deity; the Shinto storm god"
- Domain of influence: Storms, Sea, Chaos
- Pantheon: Japanese
- Classification: Tier 1
- Original script: 須佐之男命
- Series: The Restoration Files, No. 465 of 548
The File Continues
Read the founding dispatch for the name's full story, the Resonance File for the archetype at work — or the whole archive in one sitting.
Continue the series — previous file: Sūrya (read it here) · next file: Suttungr (read it here).
The Restoration Files are written from the same canonical record as the temples themselves: the lexicon, the lore catalog, the pattern atlas, and the cited scholarly sources. If a file ever disagrees with its temple, the temple is right — tell us, and the file will be corrected.