Myth as the Basis for Ritual

The Great Purification Prayer, known in Japanese as the Oharae no Kotoba, grounds its ritual authority in myth rather than abstract command: it recounts the storm god Susanoo's offenses against his sister Amaterasu and the gods' subsequent expulsion of him, then describes how the resulting impurity was scattered and carried away by a sequence of purifying deities, from mountain streams down to the sea and finally into the underworld. By narrating impurity as something that has already, mythically, been successfully removed once before, the prayer treats the present ritual not as an experiment but as a re-enactment of an established, working pattern. Its language survives because it was written down in the Engishiki, a tenth-century compilation of court law and ceremonial procedure, though the practice of communal purification it describes, called oharae, is generally understood to be considerably older than that written record.

Because so much of early Shinto ritual speech was transmitted orally rather than in texts meant to be read outside ceremonial performance, the Engishiki's preservation of this prayer's full wording is unusually valuable to historians of Japanese religion, offering a rare window onto formal court liturgy from before the medieval period.