Kasuga Taisha, founded in 768 CE at the base of Mount Mikasa on the eastern edge of the city of Nara, was built to house four kami of the powerful Fujiwara clan, and its founding legend holds that the first of them, Takemikazuchi, a thunder and sword deity already prominent in the Kojiki's account of the pacification of the earthly land for the heavenly grandchild's descent, traveled from the Kashima shrine in the east riding upon the back of a white deer.
From that founding journey, the deer living in the forested hills around the shrine came to be regarded not as ordinary wildlife but as shinroku, divine messengers embodying a living connection to Takemikazuchi himself, and the entire wooded park surrounding the shrine, Kasugayama, was declared sacred and placed off limits to logging and hunting, preserving what is now one of the very few pieces of old growth forest remaining so close to a major Japanese city. Unlike Kitsune or Tengu, whose supernatural standing rests on shape shifting power or hybrid form, the Kasuga deer are venerated as themselves, ordinary animals rendered sacred entirely by their association with a specific kami and a specific founding legend, a distinct mode of Shinto reverence for the natural world.