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From Imperial Court Rite to Shrine Practice

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From Imperial Court Rite to Shrine Practice

Norito of this kind were originally composed and recited within the context of imperial court ritual, performed by ritual specialists on behalf of the court and, by extension, the wider realm, rather than as prayers available for ordinary individual use, reflecting Shinto's historically close entanglement with the imperial institution before the religion's modern reorganization following the end of state Shinto after the Second World War. Contemporary Shinto shrine practice continues to draw on the norito genre and its classical Engishiki-preserved examples, with shrine priests today composing and reciting norito for a very wide range of occasions, from major seasonal festivals to considerably more everyday purposes such as blessing a new building or a new car, generally following the same basic structural template, address, offering, request, that this ancient food goddess norito exemplifies.

Ise Grand Shrine, dedicated in part to Toyouke as well as to the sun goddess Amaterasu, maintains ongoing ritual traditions concerning food offerings and agricultural deities that trace conceptually, though not through unbroken textual transmission of this specific norito, back to the same broader religious concerns this Engishiki text preserves in unusually direct written form from over a thousand years ago.

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