The shide are the zigzag paper streamers, cut and folded into a characteristic lightning-like shape, that hang from the sacred rope and adorn the boundaries and implements of Shinto.
The folded form
The shide are strips of white paper cut and folded into a stepped, angular form and hung from the shimenawa rope, from the sacred boundaries of a shrine, and from ritual implements, marking, with the rope they accompany, the presence of the sacred and the line of the pure. Their sharp zigzag shape is distinctive and is often understood to suggest lightning, an association fitting to the marking of a sacred and charged space, and the bright white of the paper signifies purity.
On the wand of purification
The shide also hang from the haraegushi and the onusa, the wands the priest waves in the rite of purification, so that the streamers are swept over the person or the space being purified, and from the tamagushi, the branch of the sacred tree offered in worship, so the paper form is present at the central acts of Shinto ritual. Their whiteness and their association with the divine and with purification make them one of the essential visual elements of the tradition, appearing wherever the sacred is marked or the pure invoked. Small and simple, cut from plain paper, the shide are nonetheless among the most characteristic and most widely seen of the objects that signal the presence and the working of the kami.