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155 CHAPTER 7 Silkworm Cults in the Heavenly Grotto Amaterasu and the Children of Ama no Hoakari IN THE DECADES following the Suiko court’s decision to actively promulgate continentally inspired court ritual and the Chinese festival calendar, successive rulers worked at expanding an extensive program of bureaucratic and ritual innovations that were in large part rooted in continental conceptions of divination, spirit pacification, and sage kingship. By the reign of Tenmu tennò, one important element was the development of ancestral rites and legends for the freshly minted tennò at the apex of the newly constituted organs of government. Accompanying this shift was an increased focus within the royal cult on the Ise shrine and the figure of Amaterasu, who was promoted aggressively by Tenmu and his descendants as the main royal ancestor.1 Although there is a great deal of debate as to when and why the figure of Amaterasu came to occupy an important position in the royal cult, there can be little doubt that Tenmu and his successors were determined to underscore her importance as the chief ancestor of the ruling line. In the Nihon shoki we are told that Tenmu revived the custom of sending a consecrated princess to reside at Ise after a lapse of fifty years. Similarly, Tenmu’s consort and successor, Jitò, is said to have taken the unprecedented step of personally visiting the Ise shrine. Not long after Tenmu’s death, the status of Amaterasu as paramount royal ancestor was manifested institutionally by the Department of Rites (Jingikan), which oversaw a yearly cycle of rites for the court that were heavily focused on the connection between the tennò and the royal ancestor at Ise. All of this suggests that representations of Amaterasu in court ritual and the court chronicles were being constructed and modified at a time when the court was also actively embracing legends of female immortals and continental conceptions of astrology. Given the importance of the Ise cult for Tenmu, whose reign in many ways appears to have been a political and cultic watershed in the history of the Japanese islands, it is perhaps not surprising that scholarship of early 156 Weaving and Binding kami worship in the Japanese islands has been heavily oriented towards the study of the royal cult in general and the Ise shrine in particular. While it would be unfair to say that local lineages and cults have been completely ignored, it is nonetheless the case that local or nonroyal cultic concerns during the period tend to be discussed mainly in terms of how they shed light upon the development of Ise and the royal cult. In this chapter I propose to reverse this orientation. Although cultic influence is often assumed to have emanated from the court out towards the periphery, I argue that the cult of Amaterasu and court rites (jingi) of the period can in many ways be viewed as epiphenomena rooted in deeper cultic movements that were sweeping across the Japanese islands even prior to Tenmu’s reign. As we have seen repeatedly, many of the most important cultic developments of the age were stimulated by cultural and political contacts with the Korean peninsula and by the activities of immigrant lineages that took up residence in the Japanese islands. Although, given the nature of the textual sources available to us, it is not possible to ignore the cultic activities of the court, I take the rites and legends associated with Amaterasu and the Ise shrine as a point of departure, not an endpoint for my inquiry. One central premise in this approach is the belief that the jingi rites and mythic paradigms of the post-Tenmu court were not created ex nihilo, but through the appropriation and transformation of pre-existing mythic and ritual resources. In the pages that follow, I examine this process through a discussion of the well-known myth of the Heavenly Grotto and its relationship to the Chinkonsai and the Òharae, two of the most important rites of the post-Tenmu court.2 Isolating important moments of cultic appropriation in the court-sponsored textual corpus requires simultaneously pursuing several distinct, though closely related tracks. Much of this chapter focuses on three lineages that appear to have retained distinct cultic and mythic traditions even as they enjoyed close relations with the Yamato rulers during the sixth century . One lineage, the Owari Muraji, claimed descent from the god Ama no Hoakari no Mikoto, a deity whose cult appears to have been...

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