The agricultural archetype: shinden

The daily offerings of rice and sake which are made to the deity of sun and food in the shrines of the Imperial Ancestors at Ise are prepared from rice specially grown in the so-called "Divine Fields", or shinden. These fields represent a last surviving example of Japanese geo-mancy as it existed prior to its replacement by the Chi­nese system imported with the first wave of Chinese influence in the Nara and Heian eras. It was the agri­cultural cycle of rice-growing (introduced in Japan in the Yayoi era, between 200 BC and 250 AD) which, together with the territorial practices described earlier, contributed most to the architecture of the sacred pre­cincts and religious rites of Shintoism.

The geomantic relations between the various elements of the Divine Fields are simple and clear: on one side there is a mountain, from which water flows down to the fields; on the other lies the torii, the typical Shinto gate signalling the entrance to a sacred precinct and isolating it from the secular outside world. No attempt is yet made to orient the entire complex due north, as later stipulated by the rules of imported Chinese geomancy. The whole constitutes a kind of first gar­den, where deity and human being meet. Rice paddies were integrated into the large-scale gardens of the daimyo nobles from the early Edo era onwards, frequently in the form of a magic square - with 3x3 squares giving one magic square.

Behind the religious practice of growing and tending sacred gardens lies the belief, found throughout Japan, that the local guardian deities live in the mountains in the winter, from where they are ceremonially fetched in spring and taken to spend the summer in the rice paddies, until being returned to the mountains in autumn, after the harvest.

According to research by Nobuzane Tsukushi into ancient folk beliefs in the Ise region, the sun deity at be was ongmally beloved to descend once a year from heaven to a high mountain peak near the Isuzu nver at Ise. From there the villagers earned it down to the vat-ley in the form of a newtyfelled tree, and dragged it across the river at the foot of the mountain The village community then celebrated the arnval of the deity on the opposite shore, with a local maiden serving the de­ity as priestess and spouse for one night The earliest place of worship of the deity thus lay at the river's edge, and probably consisted of little more than a tree temporarily installed at the centre of a patch of peb­bled ground marked by a sacred rope.

Much has been conjectured about the mystenous shiki no himorogt, which we know only to be a sacred precinct strewn with pebbles m which ritual purifica­tions are performed. Such sites are mentioned in chro­nicles from as earty as the eighth century, and can be seen even today in almost every Shinto shrine - there are a particularly fine examples of shiki no himotogi m the shrines at Ise.

I believe that the origins of these shiki no himorogt lie m those ancient ablution sites on a nverbank where the mountain deity "appeared" to the community of believers for the first time Pebble beaches or pebbled areas in Japanese gardens are more than mere copies of a natural phenomenon They are archetypes of the hallowed ground of Shinto theophany.