On a crisp day in early November the Kyoto Fan team took a trip to Fushimi Inari Taisha, one of the most famous shrines in the whole city. With the harvest season at an end, it was time for the Ōhitaki Fire Festival!
Being the head shrine for the 30,000 plus Inari Shrines around the country, Fushimi Inari attracts a great number of visitors and parishioners from around Japan, and many come to Kyoto to participate in this event. The first part of the ritual begins in the shrine’s main hall where priests present offerings of food and drink, the head priest reads prayers aloud, priestesses perform a sacred kagura dance to classic gagaku music, and the priests lead those gathered in paying their respects to the deity Inari.
From 13:00 the priests and parisioners move on to a cleared space on the shrine grounds where three bonfires have been set up. Once everyone is assembled the fires are simulatenously lit. Once the smoke clears priests begin tossing bundles of prayer sticks in to fires in large, dramatic throws, scattering the wishes of Inari shrine visitors in to the fire. A copy of the purification prayer is passed out in the crowd so that not only the priests, but any attendee who wants to participate can join in on the sacred prayer chanted for everyone’s good health, fortune, and the country’s prosperity.
The heat and flames provide a dramatic backdrop as priests undertake cleansing rituals in front of each fire using water, salt, and sakaki leaves, and sacred kagura dances are performed intermittedly by shrine priestesses carrying golden bells. Slowly the mass of prayer sticks assembled before the ritual date begins to dwindle until the last word of the prayer rings out and the fire ritual ends. Set against the autumn sky and foliage, it’s said that this ritual and the fires calls to Inari to come back to Mt. Inari to rest for the winter months after its hard work in the rice fields during the harvest- and it certainly called to us as well!
Alo Japan.