This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Deguchi Nao was an impoverished widow in Ayabe, near Kyoto, living an ordinary and difficult life until the lunar New Year of 1892, when, at the age of fifty six, she experienced possession by a kami she called Ushitora no Konjin, whom she came to identify with the primal creator deity Kunitokotachi. Her age and circumstances, a poor widow with no prior religious standing, make the scale of what followed genuinely striking.
Though illiterate, she began writing under the kami's direction, producing over her remaining years more than two hundred thousand pages of automatic writing known as the Ofudesaki, proclaiming an impending divine cleansing and reconstruction of the world. That an illiterate woman produced a text of that length is itself central to how Omoto understands the writing's authorship: not her own composition, but the kami writing directly through a hand that could not otherwise write at all.
Her following grew slowly around Ayabe until Onisaburo Deguchi, who married into her family in 1900, organized her revelations into a systematic cosmology and built Omoto's institutions on their foundation, work that transformed a widow's private revelations into an organized religious movement.